Distinguished Graduate Alumni Award
The Distinguished Graduate Alumni Award recognizes UC Santa Cruz graduate alumni for notable achievement in a career directly related to their degree program. The recipient’s graduate degree from UC Santa Cruz played a significant part in their career success.
All alumni who hold a master’s or doctoral degree from UCSC are eligible.
Award criteria
- Recognized for notable professional achievements
- Recognized as a leader in their field in academia or industry
2025 Distinguished Graduate Alumni Award recipient
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
(M.S. ’05, astronomy and astrophysics)
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, dark matter, and neutron stars. She is also a researcher of Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. She is the creator of the Cite Black Women+ in Physics and Astronomy Bibliography.
Prescod-Weinstein has published one book and is working on two more. Her first book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (Bold Type Books) received multiple awards including the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the science and technology category. Her second book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie will debut April 2026 with Pantheon Books, and she is currently at work on The Cosmos is a Black Aesthetic, which will publish with Duke University Press.
Prescod-Weinstein is a member of the Department of Energy High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. Nature recognized Prescod-Weinstein as one of 10 people who shaped science in 2020, and Essence magazine recognized her as one of “15 Black Women Who Are Paving the Way in STEM and Breaking Barriers.” She received the 2017 LGBT+ Physicists Acknowledgement of Excellence Award for her contributions to improving conditions for marginalized people in physics and the 2021 American Physical Society Edward A. Bouchet Award for her contributions to particle cosmology.
In 2022, Prescod-Weinstein was the inaugural top prize winner in the mid-career researcher category of the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication.
The UCSC Alumni Awards Celebration will take place on October 17, 2025.
Previous recipients
2024 – Kamari Maxine Clarke (Grad Div ’94 & ’97)
Kamari Maxine Clarke (Grad Div, ’94 & ‘97) is the Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. With over twenty-five years of research on legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism, and the politics of globalization and race, she has explored theoretical questions of culture and power in anthropology, law, and the study of religion. Professor Clarke has authored nine books and over fifty-five peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including “Fictions of Justice” (2009) and “Affective Justice” (2019), the latter winning the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize and being a finalist for the 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Award.
One of her current project investigates the use of geospatial technology to track mass atrocity violence and build human rights cases, focusing on the democratization of evidence and the role of big data and digital tools in humanitarian crises. Her empirical ethnographic data from Mexico, Nigeria, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) examines how new forms of data are transformed into contested evidence within legal environments. She is also working on a project examining the Problem of Absence-Presence in the Black Atlantic World and is interested in knowledge, method and transmission as ways to foreground an Otherwise approach to Black social life.
Since 1999, Professor Clarke has held faculty positions at Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Carleton University, and the University of Toronto. She has trained a new generation of scholars impacting legal and anthropological scholarship and practice. Clarke has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including from the National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence in Anthropology. She is also a member of the Royal Canadian Society’s Academy of Social Science.
Previous recipients
2023 – Jennifer Bevan (Ph.D. ’06, computer science)
2023 – Jake Kendall (Ph.D. ’08, economics)
2023 – Cora Randall (Ph.D. ’85, chemistry)
2023 – Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa (Ph.D. ’18, film and digital media)
2023 – James E. Young (Stevenson ’73, literature & psychology; Ph.D. ’83, literature)
2022 – Brian Levine (M.S. ’96 & Ph.D. ’99, computer engineering)
2022 – William Long (B.A. ’11 & M.A. ’13, music)
2022 – Harryette Mullen (Ph.D. ’90, literature)
2022 – Sarah Peelo (Ph.D. ’09, anthropology)
2022 – Risa Wechsler (Ph.D. ’01, physics)
2021 – Adrian Centeno (M.A. ’16, theater arts)
2021 – Macarena Gómez-Barris (Ph.D. ’04, sociology)
2021 – bell hooks (Ph.D. ’83)
2021 – Rachel Karchin (Stevenson ’98, computer engineering; M.S. ’00 computer science; Ph.D. ’03, computer engineering)
2021 – Ian Walton (Ph.D. ’77, mathematics)
2020 – William “Bro” D. Adams (Ph.D. ’82, history of consciousness)
2020 – V. Ernesto Méndez (Ph.D. ’04, environmental studies)
2020 – Danesh Moazed (Crown ’85, biology; Ph.D. ’89, biology)
2020 – Matt Taddy (Ph.D. ’08, statistics and stochastic modeling)
2020 – Nicholas Vasallo (D.M.A. ’11, music)
2019 – Steve Benz (M.S. ’10 & Ph.D. ’12, biomolecular engineering and bioinformatics)
2019 – Elaine Gan (M.F.A. ’11, digital arts and new media; Ph.D. ’16, film and digital media)
2019 – Les Guliasi (M.A. ’77 & Ph.D. ’18, sociology)
2019 – Laura Helmuth (Grad Cert ’98, science communication)
2019 – Jason Merchant (Ph.D. ’99, linguistics)
2018 – Naomi J. Andrews (Cowell ’88 & M.A. ’93 & Ph.D. ’98, history)
2018 – Diane Bridgeman (Ph.D. ’77, psychology)
2018 – Randal Chilton Burns (M.S. ’97 & Ph.D. ’00, computer science)
2018 – Rachel Nelson (Ph.D. ’16, visual studies)
2018 – Thomas R. Webb (Ph.D. ’80, synthetic organic chemistry)
2017 – Claudio Campagna (Ph.D. ’87, biology)
2017 – Dan Heller (Rachel Carson ’85, computer science; M.F.A. ’13, digital arts and new media)
2017 – Betsy Herbert (Ph.D. ’04, environmental studies)
2017 – Adam Siepel (Ph.D. ’05, computer science)
2017 – Emily Sloan-Pace (Ph.D. ’12, literature)
Learn more about the previous Distinguished Graduate Alumni Award recipients on the Division of Graduate Studies website.