Meet these and 17 other recent Fordham graduates—all in their 20s—who are amplifying the spirit of passionate engagement at the heart of the University’s mission.

A goalkeeper from Ghana pursues his ‘right to dream’

As a child in Ghana, Rashid Nuhu attended Right to Dream, a youth development academy that combines soccer training with academic coursework. He earned a scholarship to the Kent School in Connecticut, where he was encouraged to consider Fordham by fellow Right to Dream graduate Nathaniel Bekoe, GABELLI ’14, who played for the Rams from 2010 to 2013.

Nuhu starred at Rose Hill, helping to lead Fordham to the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals in 2018 before earning a degree in economics.

But professional success didn’t come immediately. He was drafted by the New York Red Bulls in 2019 and spent a year in the club’s development system. Without a contract after parting ways with the organization, Nuhu began training at Rose Hill. One day, men’s soccer coach Carlo Acquista told him about an opportunity to try out for Union Omaha in the third-division USL League One, whose coach had inquired about Nuhu.

“I was like, Yeah, why not?” Nuhu says. “I didn’t have a team. If there’s a team that wants me, that’s what I want.”

Nuhu went to the tryout, made the team, and has thrived ever since, winning a championship with the club in 2021 and earning the 2022 Golden Glove award as the league’s Goalkeeper of the Year.

“It was surreal for me, going through hardship,” he says. “I could have given up, I could have quit, but I kept on going and now things are falling into place, and it feels great to see your hard work pay off.”

An actor finds his footing in film and TV

Miles Gutierrez-Riley says it was at Fordham College at Lincoln Center that he truly grasped how to be a well-rounded actor and person—although the California native has charm and charisma that can’t be taught in the classroom.

Set to appear as Hulkling in the forthcoming Marvel Studios and Disney+ series Agatha: Coven of Chaos, Gutierrez-Riley has already starred in a coming-of-age feature film, The Moon & Back (2022), and the Amazon Studios series The Wilds since graduating from the Fordham Theatre program in 2020.

Amid this year’s historic strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the 25-year-old rising star has been auditioning for theater productions.

“My heart really does lie in theater, and I also love making TV and movies,” he says. “I want the flexibility and the reputation to have a name in all three of those.”

The Collaborative Spirit of Fordham Theatre

Gutierrez-Riley says he chose Fordham Theatre for the individualized attention it offers students and for Fordham’s interdisciplinary core curriculum, including courses in science and theology. He took advantage of the Lincoln Center campus’s proximity to the Broadway theater district. Seeing shows after classes and seeing what he and his classmates could create on a regular basis made the dream feel within reach, he says.

He humbly recalls acting in 10 shows at Fordham, directing one, and being involved in small ways with as many projects as he could. He says his favorite classes, Collaboration I and II, helped him learn to take constructive criticism, creatively engage with others, and garner a deep appreciation for critical communication.

This collaborative spirit lies at the core of the Fordham Theatre program, says Gutierrez-Riley, who credits a former professor, Stephanie DiMaggio, FCLC ’04, with encouraging him to be “a really alive being.”

“She told me things like, ‘When you’re at the deli, talk to the people and say thank you,’ and ‘Take your headphones out on the subway.’ I really didn’t understand this until I was out in the world,” he says. “Having so many different experiences with so many different people is what’s going to make you a strong actor.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

A neuroscientist investigates the drivers of depression

Devin Rocks has always been drawn to the deep mysteries of the brain. When several friends at his high school in Queens, New York, experienced anxiety and depression, his interest in how the brain works—and why things sometimes go awry—only intensified.

“It’s the organ we know the least about, by far,” he says. In his junior year at Fordham, he started conducting research with biology professor Marija Kundakovic, Ph.D., who studies the female brain.

“Many neuroscience studies, even now, are conducted primarily on male animals,” says Rocks, who completed a bachelor’s degree in integrative neuroscience in 2017 and earned a doctorate in biology from Fordham last spring. But women are about twice as susceptible to depression and anxiety than men, and hormonal fluctuations could be part of the reason why, Rocks says.

His doctoral research built on the Kundakovic Lab’s previous finding that when estrogen levels drop in mice, anxiety and depression-related behaviors increase. Rocks, who is now a postdoctoral associate at Weill Cornell Medicine, identified a molecule that seems to be key for mediating changes in gene expression that are linked to the rodents’ behavioral symptoms—a finding that could help pave the way for sex-specific treatments for anxiety and depression, according to Kundakovic, who says that Rocks’ research will be of “great relevance for women’s mental health.”

An investor provides capital for overlooked communities

From the South Side of Chicago to New York City investment banks, Capitol Hill, and Mexico City startups, Israel Muñoz has been all over the map working to change the distribution of capital.

“Even within venture capital, less than two or three percent goes to women, less than two percent goes to people of color,” he says, “and capital is the tool for building the future.”

As a first-generation Mexican American in Chicago, Muñoz became involved in grassroots organizing and activism surrounding public education when he noticed his high school struggling to provide viable resources to students. He earned a scholarship to attend Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he intended to major in political science but quickly switched to economics—a subject that was “an abstraction” to him until he took an introductory macroeconomics course taught by Michael Buckley, Ph.D.

Attending Fordham at the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Muñoz became interested in understanding wealth and income inequality and how economic forces shape the world at large. That curiosity was nourished by his time in the Matteo Ricci seminar, an honors course for students interested in connecting research with community engagement. For Muñoz, the experience deepened his political consciousness and planted the seeds for him to apply for a Fulbright scholarship.

“We spoke about economic inequality and we read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The thoughts about the one percent and power and wealth were really swimming in my head. I think Matteo Ricci just made me a more informed citizen,” says Muñoz, who also earned a Campion fellowship from Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships that took him to Chile to research education inequality.

Increasingly interested in finance, he interned at UBS, JPMorgan Chase, and in the offices of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin before a Fulbright scholarship took him to Mexico City, where he gained exposure to the Latin American tech ecosystem.

He credits Anna Beskin, Ph.D., then an advisor in Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships, for her constructive help with his Fulbright essay. “If Anna wasn’t there, I probably wouldn’t have gotten [the opportunity] and become a venture capital investor,” he says.

Since returning from his Fulbright experience Mexico, Muñoz has worked as an investment analyst for the Illinois state treasurer and as an associate at Acrew Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund. He also helped start Angeles Investors, a Hispanic- and Latinx-focused angel investor group.

“I think it’s really important that capital be distributed in a different way,” he says, “so that more of us have a shot at creating the future.”

A Fulbright scholar works to strengthen democracy

For as long as she can remember, Madalyn Stewart has loved France. From the romance of Paris to the taste of crepes and the melody of the language, the country has lived in her dreams. This year, though, it got real.

The Seattle native recently earned both a Fulbright scholarship and a Phi Kappa Phi fellowship. Now she’s pursuing a master’s degree at Sciences Po in Paris, where she’s studying the Vote Blanc movement, a form of civic participation in which citizens cast a blank vote during elections. What interests her, she says, is the effort it takes to cast a blank ballot. 

“You have to actually bring your own little blank note card, and there can’t be writing on it; otherwise, it won’t be counted,” she says, adding that about 2 million people cast blank votes in the last presidential election.

Office of Prestigious Fellowships Helps Fund a Dream

Stewart, who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and French and francophone studies at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2022, was admitted to Sciences Po last year, but she had to defer her admission because she didn’t receive enough scholarship support.

She worked with Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships to apply for the Fulbright and the Phi Kappa Phi awards. “That all just came to fruition this year—it all really fell into place,” she says.

Why France? When her mother was in her 20s, she took a trip there, and Stewart grew up poring over the negatives and photos. Her father ran a creperie for a few years, and little things like that, she says, kept France in the back of her mind. 

When it was time to pick a language in high school, the choice was clear. “And I mean, once I started, I didn’t want to stop,” she says.

At Fordham, she took “classes that weren’t just about French people in France,” but ones that gave her a sense of the politics and their research implications. 

“France is one of the countries that doesn’t keep track of race and ethnicity anymore,” she notes, prompting her to wonder “what that means for racial discrimination in the country, and what that means even for myself for research—when you can’t ask people about their race and ethnicity on a survey.” 

Every Vote Counts—Here and Abroad

At Fordham, Stewart took a course with Professor Christina Greer, Ph.D., called Racial and Ethnic Politics, and it piqued her interest in voting equity and accessibility. For the final project, students were assigned to explore potential avenues for increasing voter accessibility in Georgia.

“My group looked at free public transportation on Election Day, and because Dr. Greer has all kinds of connections, she got a voice memo from Stacey Abrams thanking us for what we did,” Stewart says. “That was one of the first classes I took that talked about voting accessibility [and it] got me excited.”

The summer after her junior year, Stewart interned with Citizens Union, a nonpartisan organization committed to reforming New York’s city and state governments. As a member (and later president) of the University’s Every Vote Counts club, Stewart helped teach civics to high schoolers and did voter registration and mobilization. She also became involved with Let NY Vote, a statewide nonpartisan coalition working to make registering and voting accessible and equitable for every eligible New Yorker.

Those experiences, plus a senior-year internship with the Brennan Center for Justice, prepared her well for the work she’s doing now. And she’s grateful to Fordham for helping to get her to France to pursue on-the-ground, public impact research.

“If I had to summarize where Fordham goes above and beyond, it’s really connecting me to resources and experiences that, going into school, I didn’t really know existed—or at least never imagined that they would be within my reach,” Stewart says.

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

A Legal Defense Fund Policy Fellow fights for educational justice

When Sarah Seo was teaching kindergarten in New Orleans several years ago, she began to reckon with an education system marked by disinvestment.

“I thought about going into law and being able to have involvement in more structural change,” she says. “I was really drawn to Fordham Law’s motto, ‘In the Service of Others.’ That has kind of been my own motto without really knowing it.”

Reflecting on her time at Fordham, she credits the Stein Scholars Program in Public Interest Law and Ethics with opening major doors for her.

“Sometimes for public interest students, it feels like you’re swimming upstream when everyone is going into the private sector,” she says, but program’s community of students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, including her Stein program mentor, Nick Loh, LAW ’22, helped her feel supported in her chosen career path.

Last spring, after earning a J.D. from Fordham, she was named a policy fellow at the Legal Defense Fund in Manhattan, where she had worked as an intern before graduation.

Seo counts several Fordham Law professors as mentors, including Catherine Powell, who specializes in digital rights and civil liberties and is a former assistant council at the Legal Defense Fund (LDF). “I spoke to her about her career path at LDF,” Seo says. “I was so grateful that Professor Powell, who never had me as a student, really let me into her world there.”

Originally from Los Angeles, Seo describes New York as a hub for policy work and Fordham as a tight community. She quickly got involved with several organizations on campus, including the school’s Suspension Representation Project, which trains law students to represent public school students in suspension hearings. As director of the student-run initiative, Seo led training sessions for her fellow law students.

“I felt like it combined these interests that I had in education and working with students but also … criminal justice and school discipline,” she says.

She also served as a member of the Fordham Law Moot Court Board and as the inaugural managing editor of the Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum.

Now, at the Legal Defense Fund, she’s focusing on educational injustices—specifically book bans and legislative attempts to curtail historically accurate teachings. “So many amazing advocates have worked at LDF,” she says, “and I knew I wanted to be a part of its storied legacy fighting for racial justice and equality.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

An award-winning filmmaker blends horror and sci-fi

When it was time to apply to college, Luke Momo took one tip in particular to heart: Don’t major in film. A close, older friend suggested he pick one of the humanities—English, history, philosophy—and instead explore the ways a particular subject intersects with film.

Now, with an award-winning debut feature under his belt and a trove of ideas to pursue, Momo has been reflecting on his time at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in philosophy, dove into filmmaking as a visual arts minor, and forged connections that proved invaluable when it came time to cast his movie, Capsules. 

A Princeton, New Jersey, native, Momo was drawn across the river to the University for its “intellectual rigor,” originally choosing to major in classics. He did veer from his friend’s advice a bit by minoring in visual arts with a concentration in film. But a philosophical ethics class he took with professor Janna van Grunsven, Ph.D., during his sophomore year made him reconsider. 

“After I took that class, I realized that [it was]what I’d want to do my major in [and explore]the intersection between philosophy and film,” he says. The professor “was able to share with me a higher level of some of the things I was interested in at that time—and I still am. She was very supportive in that way.”

Creating a Cinema Community on Campus

Outside of class, Momo founded Fordham’s Filmmaking Club in 2016, a kind of film study group for students interested in viewing and discussing movies, as well as pursuing projects together.

“We could help each other make our films and collaborate,” he says. “We’d have very memorable screenings of all kinds of different movies that you otherwise wouldn’t see, and you could watch them in a group and discuss them afterward.”

The club continues today, with students collaborating on film projects, sharing them, and hosting film festivals. “It seems to be fulfilling its original purpose and also growing—becoming more and encompassing more ideas and progressing,” Momo says.

He also completed two internships, one at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative—an artist-run nonprofit—and one at Le Cinéma Club, a curated streaming platform featuring one free film each week. 

“It was just really cool because week after week, we were researching, writing about, discovering, and highlighting works of film art,” he says, including a number of international films to which he wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed. 

From Campus Collaboration to Award-Winning Feature

Capsules, which Momo wrote with Davis Browne, FCLC ’19, features more than half a dozen Fordham graduates in starring and behind-the-scenes roles. 

The film blends sci-fi and horror, focusing on four chemistry students who experiment with mysterious substances and find themselves struggling with addiction in an unexpected way: They’ll die unless they take more.

“I just basically pursued an emotional feeling … the fear of letting one’s life slip away and a sadness over mistakes,” says Momo, who directed the film. The premise came after the pandemic, when “we had been through so many traumas personally, in our communities, and on a global level. All these things came together, and the idea for Capsules just sort of emerged.”

The film earned the Best Feature award at the 2022 Philip K. Dick Film Festival in New York City. Momo later sold the film to a distributor, and it’s available to watch on Tubi and Vudu.

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

A Visa lottery winner finds her path to medical school

Growing up in Albania, Sonola Burrja never imagined that she would move to Mamaroneck, New York, and study in the United States. But when her family won the U.S. government’s Diversity Immigrant Visa program lottery in 2018, the plan changed.

“The plan was that my younger brother and I get educated outside of Albania, which would probably result in our … not going back, [but]when we won the U.S. lottery, my parents saw it as a great opportunity for the entire family to stay together,” says Burrja, who graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in May.

Now, just five years after moving to New York, she’s a first-year student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. And she can’t imagine not having gone to Fordham, where she joined the pre-health program, majored in biological sciences, minored in German, and was part of the University’s inaugural group of ASPIRES scholars. Partially supported by the National Science Foundation, the program—which stands for Achievement in STEM through a Program of Immersive Research Experience and Support—provides a select group of undergraduates with scholarships for their four years at Fordham, guidance in and out of the lab, and funding for their undergraduate research. 

Conducting Ethical Research

Through ASPIRES, Burrja began collaborating with professors and conducting research almost right away—albeit not in the way she expected. It was March 2020, when COVID-19 spread to the United States, so her plan to conduct in-person research had to be put on hold in favor of a virtual research project.

“I was supposed to meet up with a researcher at Fordham that week that everything got shut down,” she recalls. Instead, she spent the summer working with Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D., a psychology professor and associate dean for strategic initiatives at Fordham College at Rose Hill, studying statistical data on diabetes and COVID-19 comorbidity.

Burrja went on to earn three undergraduate research grants from Fordham to support her work with biology professor Marija Kundakovic, Ph.D. She joined the Kundakovic Lab to study the epigenetic effects of hormones in female brains. 

“I never knew that there were so many differences between female and male brains—and that somebody at Fordham was actually tackling this issue,” Burrja says, explaining why she asked Kundakovic to be her mentor. “I really thought it was very interesting because some conditions, for example, depression and anxiety, have a sex bias of females during their reproductive stage. There are some huge differences, and we still don’t know enough about this topic—and the brain generally is a very unexplored area.”

To help her navigate the ethical questions that need to be taken into consideration when conducting research, Burrja took Ethics and Research, a course that allowed her to “discuss some very difficult dilemmas” and think deeper “about some issues that don’t really come into our lives, but if you go into medicine or if you go into actually doing research, those issues might come up—and there are actual consequences to being on one side or the other.”

And they will come up: Burrja plans to become a doctor. She’s not yet sure what her specialty will be, but one thing in particular is a must.

“The patient interaction part is something that I would not want to sacrifice,” she says. “I would like to be able to speak with them and just be an advocate for them, especially working with underserved populations.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

A history teacher helps middle schoolers chart their own course

In her first year at Fordham, Chantal Chevalier took a job in the admission office that showed her the kind of career she didn’t want to pursue.

“I realized that I did not like working in an office,” the Bronx native admits. “I talk too much, and I can’t look at a wall all day.”

When an opportunity arose for her to become a volunteer teacher with Generation Citizen, a group that partners with schools to provide civics lessons, she gave it a shot—and there was no turning back.

“I learned that I have a different connection with kids,” Chevalier says.

In her sophomore year, she began working as a college transition coach for the Student Leadership Network, helping juniors and seniors at In-Tech Academy in the Bronx apply to colleges, find financial aid opportunities, and plan for a big transition, potentially away from home.

Jump-Starting a Career in Education

Meanwhile, she switched her major from psychology to history and began looking into the Graduate School of Education’s accelerated Master of Science in Teaching program. That program, one of more than 30 dual-degree programs at Fordham, allowed her to take graduate-level courses as a senior and earn a master’s degree with only one additional year of study.

Now, after earning a bachelor’s degree in history at Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2020 and her master’s in teaching the following year, she’s a seventh grade history teacher at the City College Academy of the Arts in upper Manhattan. She encourages her middle schoolers to start thinking about college as an option.

“That’s something that I’m really passionate about,” she says. “It’s very overwhelming for a lot of kids, especially if your parents didn’t go to college, or they went 40 years ago. It’s a completely different process now.”

Chevalier is just as passionate about teaching history, and she says that highlighting the human elements of past events is a key to keeping students engaged.

“I try to bring them together through the stories of people,” she explains. “I think that’s where you can learn a lot about human interaction and society, and what makes a society successful and what makes a society fail.”

She is also cognizant, she says, of how histories are told from specific perspectives.

“I think my approach is always to be as honest but as careful as possible, because I never want to put my own opinion into a student’s mind,” Chevalier says. “My job as an educator is to go in and to teach certain skills, to teach certain content, while also acknowledging who I am in this world.”

As a first-generation college graduate who was raised by a single mom, Chevalier is well aware of the challenges many middle school students and families face making ends meet.

“I want to be able to put my kids on to new opportunities, to tell them about the different things that they can do with their lives,” she says. “Where you are and where you were born is not the end-all be-all. You can create your own path, your own opportunity.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

A U.N. communications officer and analyst helps farmers adapt to climate change

Chicago native Ian Muir Smith got his first meaningful exposure to the effects of climate change in 2021, as a Fordham College at Lincoln Center student majoring in international studies.

He earned a summer research grant to travel to Kenya, where he spent three months studying how farmers are using technology to mobilize resources and “guide their own development,” he says. He lived in an adobe hut with no running water and watched his hosts’ water reserves run out because of a drought.

“That was the context of everything that was happening in people’s lives,” he says.

Toward a More Just Model of Agricultural Development

The farmers Smith lived with in Kenya are among nearly 4.5 billion people who rely on food systems for their livelihood, according to the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs. It’s a statistic that lies at the heart of Smith’s work as a consultant for the U.N.’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and as a research fellow for the nonprofit Food Tank.

“In order for countries to ‘develop,’ agriculture is the first thing that has to change,” Smith says, noting that agriculture is also responsible for one third of global greenhouse gasses contributing to climate change. “And whether they get to determine how to do it, or whether other countries and companies are determining how they do it, is up in the air. I want to make agriculture and agricultural development more just and more democratic.”

As a communications and knowledge management consultant with IFAD, which is an international financial institution and specialized United Nations agency, Smith looks over data from the portfolio of grants that the agency sends to research institutions to help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change. He then writes reports and blog posts on the effects those grants had. These are made available in the agency’s “knowledge base,” a database that is publicly available and sent to partners and donors.

Working to Ensure That Climate Debt Gets Paid

By the time his final semester rolled around, he had the opportunity to take a communications internship with the United Nations in Rome, where IFAD is headquartered, beginning his professional relationship with the agency and furthering his passion for steering developmental resources to those most impacted by industrialization and climate change.

“The reason that I want to do what I want to do,” he explains, “is that I truly believe the U.S. and Europe owe a debt to the billions of people who are suffering because of the climate crisis and neo-imperialism. And I want to spend my life making sure that debt is paid.”

Since graduating, Smith has helped organize several youth climate actions and is currently working to start a microfinancing social enterprise to invest in women’s communal banking groups in Kenya. And while food system and climate issues can often result in a sort of “doom and gloom” feeling, Smith says that his work has made him feel more optimistic about meeting the challenge.

“Every day I learn about new organizations doing new work that is changing people’s lives,” he says. “There are millions and millions of people who are working on food systems and are determined to make the world better.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.