Shayla Brown

There are more than 6,000 languages spoken in the world, and almost half of them are endangered. George Mason University researcher Antonios Anastasopoulos is working to keep those endangered languages alive and has built a Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at the university devoted to this work.

Federico Frum, BA Art and Visual Technology ’05, believes in the power of art to bring people together. Known professionally as MasPaz—Spanish for “more peace”—Frum has spent his career fusing activism and creativity, using bold street murals, community engagement, and cultural storytelling to spread a message of unity.

George Mason music professor June Huang sees connections between musical collaboration and peacebuilding, and she and her students demonstrate those connections with The Spheres Project, a strings faculty and student collaborative space established in 2021.

Historical dramas may be nothing new to the theater, but an original opera based on a landmark Supreme Court Civil Rights case? Rick Davis knew this was something different. After learning that Virginia Opera was planning to stage their new opera, Loving v. Virgina—based on the historic Supreme Court case striking down a Virginia law that banned interracial marriage—Davis seized the unique opportunity for his students. 

At the 2024 Best of Film at George Mason showcase, film and video studies major James Bah screened his music video, The Show, which he directed for rapper Bobby Feeno, also known as former NFL running back Arian Foster.

Only five years after graduating from George Mason University, alumna Rhyan Elliott, Film and Video Studies ’20, was recently a production supervisor for the five-time Oscar-winning film Anora (2024), directed by Sean Baker.

Growing up, George Mason University senior Haila Salaheddine was not a big fan of going to the dentist. “I was initially very fearful of the dentist. When I was living in Lebanon, there wasn’t really preventative care for oral hygiene,” said Salaheddine, a community health major.

When George Mason University junior Megan Miller toured the Prince William-Manassas Regional Adult Detention Center, she didn’t realize she was being interviewed for an internship position. 

Based on their years of research studying how student-athletes move, George Mason University bioengineering professors Parag Chitnis and Siddhartha Sikdar have created a start-up called Myokinetics LLC with the goal of providing personalized rehabilitation programs for injured athletes.

This spring, George Mason University Professor Al Fuertes traveled to Rwanda to facilitate workshops for former victims and perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan mass genocide.