Eliminating Barriers

Tafadzwa Chigumira is the recipient of the CIT Presidential Fellowship. She is a doctoral candidate studying chemical engineering.

Christophe Johnson is an MBA candidate at the Tepper School of Business, focusing on strategy, business technologies, marketing and entrepreneurship. A recipient of the Martin C. Stetzer Fellowship and the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management Fellowship, Christophe was a team captain in the Carnegie Mellon Africa – Global Innovation Challenge 2022, securing first place.

He serves as president of the African Business Collective and vice president of both the Black Business Association and Marketing Club, and is a member of the Business and Technology Club Advisory Board and University Student Affairs Council. He is also a student-in-residence for a Pittsburgh-based AI and machine learning startup and a venture capital firm.

Christophe is a founding member of Carnegie Autonomous Racing, a student government-recognized organization, where he led the business development team, securing funding from major donors like Applied Intuition, SKU| Custom Robots and Machines and Blue Origin. With a strong background in technology, consulting and product management, he co-founded a Florida-based edtech startup and currently serves as its product manager. Christophe is also a committed mentor, helping undergraduate business students secure internships and fellowships at prestigious banks and consulting firms.

After completing his MBA, he will join Intuit as a product marketing manager. Passionate about innovation, marketing, and technology, Christophe looks forward to contributing to the university’s philanthropy efforts in the future.

The recipient of a GEM Fellowship and ARCS Scholar Award, Kate Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering who studies air quality and climate modeling. She recently worked on a historical evaluation of reduced-complexity air quality models intended for policy analysis, and is now working on a global climate model development project.

Johnson worked at Brookhaven from June to August 2022 with mentor Allison McComiskey, chair of the Lab’s Environmental & Climate Sciences Department. Johnson earned her bachelor’s degrees in environmental engineering and musical theatre from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Jasmine is a John Wells Fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, pursuing her MFA in directing. Before moving to Pittsburgh, Jasmine was an Arizona-based theatre artist working as a director, choreographer, actor, dancer, teaching artist and arts administrator.

She was the director of learning and education for Arizona Theatre Company (ATC), for two years after serving as the company’s education associate for three. In her time at ATC, she founded ATCteen and the ATCteen Council to provide free, accessible and equitable theatre education focusing on leadership, craftsmanship and the empowerment of teen artists, successfully ran a flagship of TCG’s Veterans Playwriting Projects, where she mentored four military veterans in the process of turning their experiences into theater, deepened community partnerships, and expanded education programming to adult artists and community members.

Jasmine studied theatre and dance at Union College in upstate New York. She also trained as an actor with New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Apprentice Program, Saratoga Shakespeare Company and SITI Company.

Michael Young joined Carnegie Mellon University’s Mellon College of Science as the first associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and works to foster a diverse and inclusive community that supports the college’s faculty, staff and students.

He earned his Ph.D. in mathematical sciences at CMU in 2008 and maintained a close relationship with the university in the years since as an instructor in CMU’s Summer Undergraduate Applied Mathematics Institute and Summer Academy for Math and Sciences.

During his career, Young started a number of nationwide initiatives and held several leadership roles geared towards addressing race and inequity in education. He founded the networking organization, the Center for Minorities in the Mathematical Sciences, and the Mathematics Enrichment through Diversity and Learning (MEDAL) organization. MEDAL provides diversity training and professional development to teachers and faculty as well as tutoring and mentoring services through the United Negro College Fund’s STEM Scholar Program and through CMU’s Tartan Scholars Program.

Young also serves as a faculty member in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. His research is in discrete mathematics, specifically graph theory, combinatorics and applications to combinatorial matrix theory.