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Each year, Projects for Peace supports undergraduates who have proposed “innovative, community-centered, and scalable” projects around the globe that “address the world’s most pressing issues.”

In this round of awards, 134 students from 93 universities and colleges earned the summertime grant of $10,000. “Almost half of the grantees will address issues related to health and well-being,” the program said. “Other common areas regard the quality of and access to education, youth development, environmental issues, and protecting human rights.” 

Olujobi will return to her home country of Nigeria to introduce students in under-resourced high schools to fun neuroscience experiments, to ignite their excitement and curiousity about science. Souza will also return to his home in Brazil to teach job-hunting skills to disadvantaged young people of color.

Empowering Futures: From the Basketball Court to the Workforce in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Souza, a government and history major, will use his grant to travel to Rio de Janeiro and provide low-income young people—ages sixteen to twenty-one—the tools and knowledge they need to find jobs and internships.

He plans to work with students associated with , an organization that cultivates social integration and builds community through sports. Souza argues that athletics, like the basketball games he loved to play growing up, teach and reinforce the skills of discipline, resilience, and teamwork—which are transferable to other areas, including education and employment.

His efforts this summer will target Black and brown Brazilians, who are “significantly underrepresented in the formal job market,” he says. They face challenges that are “deep-rooted and multifaceted, involving issues of systemic racism, education disparities, and social exclusion.”

Not only do Black and brown Brazilians experience higher unemployment, they have a higher rate of unemployment and are paid, on average, 40 percent less than their white counterparts, according to a study Souza cites in his grant application.

Souza's job-training workshops will focus on interview preparation, resume building, and LinkedIn profile development while also addressing broader social issues like gender and racial equity in the workforce.

When he leaves the city at the end of the summer, he hopes the foundation he has laid will lead to a long-running program. “Former members of the program will be able to come back and guide the next generation of participants,” he said. He'll also give his teaching materials and recorded workshops to Ubuntu, which could reuse them and also distribute them to other clubs and NGOs. 

Fostering Interest in STEM Careers Through Access and Exposure in Lagos, Nigeria

Olujobi knows that to become infused with the desire to pursue science as a career, you first must be exposed to the wonders of research and scientific discovery.

Last summer, she worked in the lab of Professor of Neuroscience and Biology Manuel Díaz-Ríos, “in what turned out to be a transformative experience. For the first time, I was conducting independent research and exploring, for myself, the beauty and complexity of research,” she said.

She was shocked by how much she enjoyed it—and attributed her surprise to her lack of prior research experience and her narrow understanding of its importance. “I began to wonder, 'How much are students back home missing out on because they’ve never had the opportunity to see for themselves?'” she said.

A lack of exposure to science is all the more likely in under-resourced, overcrowded public schools. In Lagos public schools, students number over 1 million. Meanwhile, those same institutions often have just one teacher for over 100 students, leading to many missed opportunities to teach science in a meaningful way, she added.

To address this, Olujobi will return to Lagos and offer a series of workshops in five low-income high schools, with the help of medical students and other instructors. Her next step will be to hold a one-day intensive “boot camp” for forty selected students from these schools. Partnering with a Lagos-based , she is also developing a website to allow students to keep learning beyond the program.

Her curriculum will be based on affordable neuroscience kits created by Backyard Brains—kits she first used in Díaz-Ríos's class Brains in Motion her first semester at ���ϳԹ�������վ.

“I wished these kits could travel to my home country of Nigeria to reach students who, like me, come from low-income backgrounds, which limits their exposure to practical STEM learning opportunities,” she said. Díaz-Ríos will permanently donate several Backyard Brains kits to the project, “as he strongly believes in the work I am setting out to do.”