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Like many Angelenos, ������̳ doctoral student Zuriel Oduwole is tuned in to Award Season, that time between November and March when nominations for major entertainment awards are announced. When her father called to check in with Oduwole and her siblings while he was traveling in February of this year, he asked them to identify which awards were most important. They rattled off the Emmys, Grammys and Oscars. Knowing they hadn’t quite hit the mark he had in mind, he asked them to think globally. They immediately thought of the Nobel Prize. He then revealed to Zuriel and her siblings that she had been nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.��

“It’s still surreal thinking about it because it’s an incredible honor, especially when you think of past recipients like President Nelson Mandela, President Jimmy Carter and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. I didn’t even think that people were paying close enough attention to what I had been doing with advocacy and youth to even nominate me,” Oduwole said.��

While she’s unsure of the specific reason she was nominated, Oduwole does know that one of her three nominators for the prestigious award is Professor of Clinical Education and Engineering Anthony Maddox. The other two are a professor from the University of Missouri and a U.S. senator.

The 23-year-old, who is a student in ������̳’s Doctor of Education in Organizational Change and Leadership online program (OCL program), has an impressive background of educational advocacy work that she’s been involved in for over a decade.��

Her interest in the subject was initially sparked by the annual National History Day contest that she entered as a nine-year-old. For the competition, applicants are asked to tell a story about a historical topic. Daring to be different, Oduwole opted to make a documentary about the Ghana revolution, which led to her meeting former presidents Jerry Rawlings and John Kufuor, who governed Ghana between 1981 and 2009.

While in Ghana to shoot scenes for the documentary, she noticed that there were children on the street, selling small items and hanging out during what would normally be school hours. She knew that if those children were in school, they could be developing skills to ensure their access to a better future.��

After Oduwole finished the documentary, she brainstormed for about a year about how she could address these issues. When she was ten years old, she started (DUSUSU Project), which focuses on educational advocacy and creating programs, including film-making workshops, for youth. The project formally evolved a few years later into a 501(c)3 non-profit.

While she has continued to make documentaries—directing seven in total—she has also become an essential and internationally recognized voice on the importance of education, especially for young girls, and a mediator for global peace.

“So far, I have spoken to over 58,470 students in 23 countries, including places like Botswana, Egypt, Seychelles and Jamaica, to talk about the importance of staying in school and the differentiating power of an education. Along the way, I learned that there are economic and political issues that relate to why young people might not be in school, and that steered me to speak with more leaders such as prime ministers, heads of state and educational leaders. These leaders could create policies that could directly impact the education opportunities for millions of youths around the world,” Oduwole said.

Oduwole has met with over 36 world leaders about these issues, providing a much-needed voice for the children who lack it. At the age of 13, Oduwole met with David Granger, then President of Guyana at the United Nations to help ease tensions between Guyana and Venezuela over the Essequibo oil territorial dispute. Oduwole has also been acknowledged for helping end girl marriage in Mozambique in 2019 after she met with President H.E. Felipe Nyusi in 2018, showing herself at age 16 as an example of what an educated girl can do. In September 2022, she received the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon Leadership Award for her ten years of development work across the globe.

Her interactions with these leaders and heads of state gave her the opportunity to “learn about different leadership styles and complex problems, which led me to this program here at USC that focuses on organizational change and leadership,” Oduwole said. The program, she feels, is a good foundation to enhance what she was already doing at the highest levels of leadership and governance across the globe.

Professor Maddox first met Oduwole while he was en route to Doha for the World Innovation Summit for Education, where they were both guest speakers. After learning about her remarkable path, he recommended that she apply to the OCL program. She’s currently the youngest member of her doctoral cohort.��

“She [Oduwole] has been on the minds and in the attention of the world for quite a while. Her basis for making her appearances and commentary is scholarly in nature, which, in my view, makes her a natural scholar. In the process of this doctoral program, Zuriel is becoming an academic scholar, and it’s my hope that the kind of inquiry and analysis that she does in her dissertation will be reproduced on the global stage,” said Maddox.��

Despite the numerous accolades and the recognition she’s received, she remains grounded and devoted to her work to educate, inform and address the inequities that she’s witnessed in her travels across the world. Maddox is hopeful that people will see the full spectrum of skills Oduwole has gained in the OCL program, which he anticipates will lead her advocacy to take new and exciting forms. With formal training in interrogating systems, examining leadership philosophies, and sharpening her skills with a multidisciplinary cohort, Oduwole will be poised to continue leading transformative change and impacting policy globally as an academic scholar skilled in research and writing that will be a vehicle and inspiration for additional learning both inside and outside the academy.����