January 2025 Young Planet Leader – Mohamed Moussa

Mohamed is an 18-year-old researcher, entrepreneur, and student at the African Leadership Academy (ALA) in South Africa. Dedicating his life to closing socioeconomic gaps, he relentlessly helped those who faced challenges similar to his. He fully realizes that he couldn’t have done any of that without freely accessible resources, which he is deeply grateful for. For that, he also aims to create and propagate free resources for everyone in need throughout his fields of interest: education, biological and climate research, and computer science.

Mohamed sees education as the foundation for uplifting nations, which drives his commitment to bridging language barriers. He is the founder and CEO of Ebhath, teaching scientific research in Arabic and publishing courses in Swahili. Further, Mohamed serves as the COO at ClosingTheDivide, an organization committed to closing gaps in access to technology and technology education. The team has raised over $300,000 and donated 1,700 desktop computers across 29 countries, while offering courses in English (US chapter), Arabic (Egyptian chapter), and Amharic (Ethiopian chapter). Given Mohamed’s coding experience in Python, JavaScript, and C++, he served as an assistant in the Hack Club chapter at his previous school and is now using this experience to develop technical courses at CTD.

Mohamed believes in research’s potential to solve our greatest challenges. As a climate activist, he recognizes that among the youth’s greatest potential contributions, especially for climate and sustainability activists, is conducting impactful empirical research that addresses real-world problems. He has completed more than four research projects in sustainability and climate science, which have been either published in research journals or presented at conferences. In neuroscience, Mohamed has also demonstrated considerable expertise through his research endeavors. In February, his abstract was selected from among more than 1,200 submissions for presentation at the International Neuropsychological Society conference in New York City. In this study, Mohamed served as the first author, collaborating with co-authors from Stanford, Rice, and Columbia University.

Mohamed’s achievements have earned him notable recognition, including being named a Rise Global Winner and achieving national runner-up finalist status in the Neuroscience Brain Bee.

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