Professor Okechukwu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology here at George Mason University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work is engaged in research on social movements, race, community studies, public history, and Black archives. She was the 2020 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow, and a 2020 African American Digital Humanities Scholar at the University of Maryland-College Park. Her book To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press, 2019) was recognized with the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Book Award from the Association of Black Sociologists. Her latest digital humanities project Black Belt Brooklyn aims to historicize and visualize Black practices of vitality, mutual-aid, and institution building in Brooklyn during a period of widespread neglect by formal political institutions at every level.