June 7, 2022The 15 students in the special topics class Facial Reconstruction started the semester with a generic plastic skull. Week by week, they sculpted different parts of their own faces, creating a portrait of themselves in clay and learning the forensic skills needed to put a face on a skull.
August 24, 2022George Mason University has been recognized as a “five-star premier campus” by Campus Pride Index, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to creating safer LGBTQ-friendly learning environments at colleges and universities. It is the only Virginia university to earn this recognition and the only public university in the state included in Campus Pride's "Best of the Best" list of 40 LGBTQ-friendly universities.
November 4, 2021Isidore Nsengiyumva, only four years old at the time, was in the fields with his father and older brother in Burundi, when suddenly they heard the sound of motors and guns. Troops involved in the country’s civil war attacked their village, and rapidly, their lives were changed.
“We hid in a bush, and when the noise of the guns and fighting subsided, we went back and found our home burned,” Nsengiyumva said. “That’s when my dad decided it was no longer safe.”
June 8, 2021Activism runs in Laila Mokhiber’s blood.
Well before she became the director of communications at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA USA), Mokhiber was a child holding protest signs in human rights demonstrations. Before then, her mother held her as a baby in the gallery of the Supreme Court, as her father argued to incorporate Arab Americans into the Civil Rights Act in 1987.
The George Mason University alumna has also made a name for herself. In 2020, she was named one of the top 40 influential Arab Americans under 40 by the Arab America Foundation.
Playing football for University of Notre Dame was something Steve Elmer said he could only dream of when he was younger. His talent combined with a scholarship had him playing on the field with a golden helmet as freshman. He became one of the team’s most experienced offensive linemen, having 30 starts to his name.
Black-footed ferrets were once thought to be extinct, until a small population was discovered in Wyoming in 1981. The species is still endangered, but scientists—including a George Mason University researcher and students at the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation (SMSC)—are coming to the rescue.
In December 2020, Willa, a black-footed ferret who died in 1988, was cloned using her cells that had been frozen. That clone, Elizabeth Ann, is now the first North American endangered species to be cloned in the United States. Senior Research Scientist Klaus-Peter Koepfli conducted critical research on her genetic cell line.
Growing up in the slums of Cameroon, Joseph Sany said he witnessed urban violence and police oppression regularly. He heard about genocide in Rwanda, and he saw more violence firsthand when he worked with NGOs and visited countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone during civil war.