Black Graduate Spotlight Initiative
The Black Graduate Spotlight Initiative combines a financial award with a symposium, where recipients share their work with a diverse, interdisciplinary audience from the UBC research community.

Friday, November 7th, 2025
4:30 pm PT to 7:30 pm PT
Thea's Lounge at the Thea Koerner House,
Room #310, 6371 Crescent Rd, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Free admission
Great food and great conversation
Meet our Awardees and Speakers

Adeerya Johnson
PhD: Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Having recently defended, her dissertation, Saltshakers: Black Women’s Cultural Production in Southern Hip-Hop Dance, introduces “dirty south feminism” as a framework for understanding Black women’s creativity, agency, and cultural labor in Atlanta’s hip-hop landscape.
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Adeerya’s research foregrounds Black women’s contributions to music, performance, and community-making, extending into museum curation and public scholarship.
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As an advocate for equity in higher education, she emphasizes the importance of supporting Black graduate scholarship to sustain critical research, amplify marginalized voices, and create pathways for future generations.

Amanda Senam Ntow
MSc: Population and Public Health
Amanda Senam Ntow is a recent graduate who has previous work experience in water, sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) implementation, HIV management, malaria prevention, and, most recently, mental health promotion.
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Her research focuses on the ways health policies shape inequities among Black African immigrants accessing mental health services in Canada.
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She strongly believes that supporting Black graduate scholarship has the potential to translate research findings into evidence-based policy strategies that improve the well-being of diverse populations, including Black People.

Eric Boateng
PhD Candidate: Genome Science and Technology
Eric’s research focuses on integrating microscopy tools with a microfluidic confinement platform to characterize individual suspended nanoparticles and investigate their interactions with live cells, advancing applications in drug delivery and nanomedicine therapeutics.
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By working in collaboration with therapeutic developers, clinicians, and interdisciplinary scientists, he is excited to translate these new biophysical insights to help improve delivery efficiency, formulation design, and treatments for challenging medical conditions.
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He is committed to mentoring and expanding research access for Black students and communities.

Ihomehe Agbebaku
MFA Candidate: Creative Writing
Ihomehe Agbebaku is a Nigerian-born storyteller. Her thesis explores the intersections of Blackness, diaspora, gender, and performance.
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Blending personal experience with cultural critique, her work examines how Black individuals navigate systems of power, memory, and survival.
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Ihomehe’s creative practice spans filmmaking, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms, often exploring themes of belonging, healing, and self-reclamation.
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She is committed to amplifying Black voices through research, performance, and community storytelling.

Nancy Ofori
MA Candidate: French Studies
Nancy is originally from Ghana, and her academic and professional background includes creating engaging learning materials to teach French and English as additional languages.
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She brings this background to her research, which explores linguistic insecurity among Black African English language assistants in French classrooms, focusing on how accent, race, and native-speaker ideologies shape their experiences.
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Through this work, Nancy seeks to amplify the voices of Black educators and challenge systemic biases in language teaching.
She believes strongly in supporting Black graduate scholarship as a means of promoting equity, representation, and transformative change in academia.

Samuel Ayoolu Oguntimehin
PhD Student: Botany
With a background in Pharmacognosy, Samuel’s research explores African medicinal plants for antimalarial, anticancer, and antidiabetic properties.
He is currently engineering tomatoes to produce montbretin A, a potent antidiabetic compound originally isolated from Crocosmia crocosmiflora native to Southern Africa.
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His work aims to improve access to this natural product for diabetes treatment, a major health burden in Africa.
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As a Black researcher addressing health disparities, support for this project will enhance its impact and help translate the findings into usable therapeutic forms.​​​​​

