Frimpong is Penn’s 31st Gates Scholar since the program’s beginning in 2001. From Ghana, he is one of 77 recipients chosen globally this year.
He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public health in global health as a Horstmann Scholar at Yale University. At Penn, Frimpong earned his undergraduate degree in biology from the College of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and a master’s in nonprofit leadership from the School of Social Policy & Practice in 2019, which awarded him the Richard Estes Global Citizenship Award.
The son of a peasant farmer and charcoal seller, he was the first person from his village, Tarkwa Breman, to attend college in the United States.
Under the mentorship of Harvey Rubin, a professor in the Perelman School of Medicine, Frimpong used the Presidents Engagement Prize to create Cocoa360, which has pioneered a “farm-for-impact” model that uses revenues from community cocoa farms to fund educational and health care services. The nonprofit now runs a tuition-free girls’ school and community hospital in his Ghana village, sustained by proceeds from a local cocoa farm.
Griffin Pitt, right, works with two other student researchers to test the conductivity, total dissolved solids, salinity, and temperature of water below a sand dam in Kenya.
Griffin Pitt’s upbringing made her passionate about water access and pollution, and Penn has given her the opportunity to explore these issues back home in North Carolina and abroad.
Rashi Sabherwal, a doctoral student in political science, explores how women engage politically in society in informal roles through her research in India.
Helping robots work together to explore the Moon and Mars
Penn Engineers, NASA, and five other universities tested robotic systems designed to help unmanned explorers cooperate in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, paving the way for Moon and Mars exploration.
