Black Teen Who Once Appeared on ‘Jeopardy’ Accepted to More Than 15 Colleges, Awarded $2M in Scholarships
Nationwide — Rotimi Kukoyi, a Nigerian American teen from Hoover, Alabama, has been accepted to more than 15 universities including Yale and Harvard. He also received a total of $2 million in scholarship offers.
Rotimi said he was inspired to strive harder academically after joining the “Jeopardy!” Teen Tournament in 2018. He was still a freshman at that time and he met outstanding students from across the country.
“It was really fun experience but also put me in contact with some pretty cool students from across the country,” Kukoyi said on Good Morning America. “A lot of them are older and they’re like seniors or juniors that applied to many prestigious schools a lot of them are attending prestigious universities now. So that was kind of my original inspiration to apply to those universities.”
Rotimi, who became the first Black National Merit Scholar at his school, was accepted to more than 15 prestigious universities including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Virginia, Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, Johns Hopkins, Duke, the University of Alabama, Case Western Reserve University, UAB, Auburn University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Rotimi decided to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was awarded its prestigious Morehead-Cain Scholarship, the oldest merit scholarship program in the country.
He has plans to pursue a career in public health to help others. His decision was triggered mostly by the things he saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“COVID really sparked [my interest in public health] because that was the first time that I really saw how clear the health inequities were,” he said. “African Americans had a much higher chance of dying from COVID than white Americans. It was almost like there were two separate pandemics impacting our nation, and we saw [some people] marginalized and impacted way more.
“I want my legacy to be one that’s focused on impacting other people. I suppose a lot of people in the pursuit of their own goals can kind of forget what it’s all about.”
Source: blacknews.com
Nigerian lady, Halima Shuwa, awarded Student of the Year at University of Manchester
By Ahmad Deedat Zakari
A Nigerian lady, Halima Ali Shuwa, has been recognised by the reputable University of Manchester and awarded with Student of the Year Award.
Ruth Macarthy, a doctoral researcher at Salford University, announced this on LinkedIn on Wednesday.
“Sitting in Whitworth Hall today, at the prestigious University of Manchester, was one of my proudest moments as a Nigerian. It was the moment Halima Ali Shuwa was called up [to] the podium to receive the “Student of the Year” award from the President of the university.” Ms Macarthy wrote.
While presenting the award, the President of the university stated that Halima was chosen because of her dedication and selfless commitment to research excellence.
The President added that Halima dedicated a huge amount of time to researching the immune response in the blood of hospitalised COVID-19 patients – and predicting which patients will further develop long-term covid complications.
She was the first to publish on the associated long-term changes with fatigue and breathlessness in patients who would subsequently develop long covid.
Halima, a recipient of the prestigious Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) scholarship, hails from Shuwa town of Madagali Local Government Area of Adamawa State. She was born, brought up and schooled in Maiduguri, Borno State.
Halima studied Bachelor of Medical Laboratory Science at the University of Maiduguri, MSc Immunology at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, and then got a PTDF scholarship to the University of Manchester, where she did her PhD in Immunology.
Halima has published seven papers in high-impact journals during her studies and has four more papers under review.
Towards the end of her PhD, Halima managed to secure multiple job offers from the University of Manchester and several pharmaceutical companies. Finally, she accepted the job offer from GSK (GlaxoSmithKline), where she’ll continue her cutting-edge research to discover an alternative cancer treatment targeting B cells in Immuno-Oncology settings.
Source: Daily Reality
