An astronomer in Baltimore. A bilingual TikTok influencer. A City Council member from The Bronx. An Emmy-winning television news producer.
Four Hunter College alumni were named to CUNY’s annual “50 Under 50” list celebrating the university’s outstanding graduates and their social, cultural, and economic contributions to New York and beyond. The complete CUNY “50 Under 50” awardees can be seen here.
The four Hunter alumni were:
Munazza Alam ’16
Munazza Alam is an astronomer, National Geographic Young Explorer, and research scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “But for Hunter,” as she noted in one of our videos, she might never have studied the stars.
A McNulty Scholar at Hunter, Alam earned her bachelor’s degree in physics and astronomy from the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College and received her PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard University in 2021. Alam was then awarded the Earth & Planets Laboratory Fellowship at the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, D.C., before joining the STScI senior science staff as an assistant astronomer in 2023. She uses data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes for her research, as well as world-class ground-based facilities at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hilo, Hawai’i, and the Las Campanas Observatory in La Serena, Chile.
In her free time, Alam is an avid artist and enjoys oil pastels and watercolors.
Hasani Arnold ’19
As a content creator, writer, and language enthusiast, Hasani Arnold has dedicated a significant portion of his life to bridging cultural gaps through storytelling.
Having spent more than four years living in mainland China and traveling extensively across Asia, Arnold shares his love for culture, language and travel with his audience of more than 340,000 followers across various social media platforms. His social media work, which has been featured by outlets including Unilad, Yahoo, and NextShark, celebrates the intersections of linguistic and cultural diversity, communication, and global connection. Beyond social media, Arnold has written widely about language and history and authored personal essays exploring life between worlds.
A first-generation college graduate born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Arnold grew up in a low-income, single-parent household before pursuing Chinese and English literature at Hunter College. His passion for cross-cultural understanding led him to earn the Schwarzman Scholarship at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he received a master’s degree in global affairs in 2022. Professionally, he has applied his linguistic and cultural expertise across diverse roles, initially at an immigration law firm as a Mandarin-English interpreter in New York City, then as a marketing strategist at ByteDance in Beijing, to his current role as social content manager at TikTok in New York City.
Arnold aims to maintain his cultural connections and deepen his knowledge of China and East Asia at large in the future. His avocations include photography, Japanese design and fashion, and coffee.
Eric Dinowitz MSE ’09
New York City Council Member Eric Dinowitz — an inaugural member of Hunter’s 40 Under 40 honorees — represents the 11th District in The Bronx. Before holding public office, Dinowitz spent 13 years working as a special-education teacher and served as chair of the Aging Committee for Bronx Community Board 8. He serves as chair of the council’s Committee on Higher Education and Jewish Caucus and is co-chair for the Task Force to Combat Hate, which gave $50,000 to Hunter for programming combating antisemitism.
Growing up attending Bronx public schools, and getting his master’s at Hunter College, Dinowitz has a personal investment in the success of NYC students. Dinowitz served as a special education teacher for thirteen years in the community, where he taught and counseled the students who needed the most support, giving them the tools that they needed to succeed.
As a Democratic district leader, Dinowitz worked to make voting easier and more accessible. He also fought for transit accessibility by joining together a coalition of local advocates and elected officials to bring an elevator to the Mosholu Parkway subway stop. He helped seniors as chair of the Aging Committee on Bronx Community Board 8, and spent hundreds of hours getting critical services to older adults throughout the pandemic.
Ricardo Montero ’19
Ricardo Montero is a multi-Emmy Award-winning journalist, working as a field producer for ABC News based in New York. Montero won his first Emmy in 2022, for Outstanding Live Breaking News Coverage as editor and tape producer for the special report during the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Just two years later, after being in the heart of Hurricane Milton for several days, Montero received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Live News Program for his work covering the hurricane with World News Tonight with David Muir.
He was also twice nominated by the 2024-2025 Emmy Awards, first for Outstanding Recorded News Special with ABC News Live, as a producer and cameraman for an immigration special and for another Emmy Award for Hurricane Milton.
Over the last decade Montero has held roles at several news networks: associate producer at Top Story with Tom Llamas on NBC News NOW, an associate producer and researcher at Weekend Nightly News, news associate at Weekend TODAY and a production associate at Good Morning America.
Montero got his start as an intern at CNN in 2016, and in 2019 graduated cum laude from Hunter College with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and a concentration in journalism.
At his alma mater, Montero got to explore multimedia journalism. He was an anchor, producer and reporter for Hunter News Now; co-founder, editor-in-chief, web manager, publicist and social media editor at The Daily Ramen; news anchor for News at Noon and host of Everything Sucks at WHCS Hunter Radio; and host of the Club Scene, a student-produced talk-show.
