Image

The University of Massachusetts Amherst will honor the exemplary achievements, initiative and leadership of some of its most talented and accomplished undergraduates during Undergraduate Commencement on Friday, May 16, at 5 p.m., in McGuirk Alumni Stadium.

This year’s 10 undergraduate recipients of the 21^st Century Leaders Award were chosen in recognition of their strong academic records and exemplary achievements. They also further distinguished themselves through intellectual accomplishments and will be recognized for the prestige and honor they bring to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, both as undergraduates and as alumni joining the larger community.

The 10 graduating seniors who will each receive a 21^st Century Leaders Award of $1,000 from the UMass Amherst Alumni Association are:

Chiruza Peter Muhimuzi, of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, moved to Boston as a refugee in 2019. He graduates with a degree in biology.

Image

His journey at UMass Amherst demonstrates his unwavering dedication to service. Notably, Muhimuzi started Chiruza-Charity, a nonprofit organization that aims to help more than 200 refugees, orphans and underprivileged students in Uganda and the DR Congo attend school by providing them with tuition and school supplies. His commitment to making a difference in the world led to his role as co-chair of the Patient Advocate Council at Boston Medical Center, where he actively works to improve the health-care experience. During his four years at UMass, he also cultivated a profound passion for public speaking and has delivered speeches at a variety of events, including Rise Up 2023, hosted by the Bottom Line organization.

With an inclination toward scientific research, Muhimuzi has completed four internships in the biotech industry, including at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he worked on cutting-edge cell and gene therapy projects for debilitating diseases. He also spent more than two years in the Babbitt Lab at UMass and has been a peer advisor in the biology department.

After graduation, Muhimuzi will work in the logistics department at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. He aspires to become a physician who can bridge the gap between clinical practice and innovative research.

 

David Akoh earned a bachelor’s degree in informatics with a concentration in data science.

Image

A devoted Christian, he has been dedicated to the betterment of campus life and fostering a jovial space of belonging over the course of his college career. He has united many religious organizations, both on and off campus, by leading the planning committees for multiple public events, including InterMinistry Worship Night in 2024 and Carry the Love and Set Ablaze in 2025. As president and choir director of UMass Gospel Choir, he has created arrangements for the choir to perform at the First Annual Gospel Festival at UMass Dartmouth and A Better Chance (ABC) Benefit Concert in Amherst. 

Akoh is also a founder and treasurer of the UMass chapter of The Impact Movement, a campus ministry organization for discipleship and spiritual growth that was named “New Chapter of the Year” by the national organization during its end-of-year conference. Through his position, he started Iron Sharpens Iron, a collaborative space for students to learn from and lean on one another.

In addition, Akoh is a member of the Manning Undergraduate Student Impact Council, a selective student committee for the College of Information and Computer Sciences, and he has worked as a resident assistant and interned for multiple businesses.

After graduation, he plans to work in business analytics.

 

Grace Cipollone, of College Point, Queens, New York, a Commonwealth Honors College student, graduates with a bachelor’s degree in biology.

Image

Working with high-needs populations was central to her UMass experience. Cipollone restarted the Food Recovery Network (FRN), rescuing perishable food from dining halls and redistributing it to the UMass community and piloting several meal swipe programs to address diverse food needs. Furthermore, she championed the establishment of the university’s Basic Needs Center, which will house a food pantry run by the Amherst Survival Center and serve as a hub for SNAP/WIC registration and FRN food distributions. As the first post-pandemic president of Alpha Phi Omega, Kappa Omicron, a co-educational community service fraternity, Cipollone also stimulated the growth of over a dozen service projects.

Her passion for medicine, research, and advocacy is evident throughout her coursework and activities. Cipollone worked at Baystate Medical Center as a research assistant, participating in innovative breast cancer research by examining the relationship between tumor suppressor p53 knockout and the expression of DNA methylating/demethylating proteins. She has also advised peers in many capacities, including as a pre-med mentor for the Minority Association of Pre-Medical Students and as a TA for Introductory Biology. She currently serves her community as an EMT and is learning Spanish to better connect with diverse patient populations.

After graduation, Cipollone plans to practice medicine in New York City. 

 

Ilana Krebs, of Watertown, a Commonwealth Honors College (CHC) student, earned dual degrees: a bachelor's degree with individual concentration in environmental microbiology and a bachelor's degree in Portuguese. Among her multiple awards, Krebs received CHC’s Honors Research Grant, which funded most of her honors thesis research on antibiotic resistance.

Image

Throughout her time at UMass Amherst, Krebs has demonstrated compassion and a collaborative spirit. Among her many accomplishments, she is proudest of delivering a healthy baby boy on one of her first shifts as an emergency medical technician as well as detecting a life-threatening symptom in an ER patient. In CHC’s Sophomores Serve program, she conducted research on food insecurity among college students and drafted legislation for the Massachusetts General Court.

On campus and beyond, Krebs participated in various organizations, including UMass Club Swimming, where she served as president and captain and qualified for the College Club Swimming National Championship several times. She has also been involved with the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network and Not Bread Alone, a local food kitchen. She gained additional leadership experience as a tour guide, hiring committee member, and new-hire mentor for UMass Amherst Admissions.

Krebs plans to attend physician associate/assistant school, hopefully in the Boston area, and pursue pediatric emergency medicine and, eventually, labor and delivery. She dreams of one day racing a Half Ironman and writing a book.

 

Jibrael Taino Harrell, of North Bergen, New Jersey, graduates with a degree in sport management. 

Image

Since coming to UMass Amherst, Harrell has intentionally worked to create an inclusive environment. As an Admissions Fellow and tour guide manager, he hired and trained the most diverse group of tour guides in recent history to better represent the campus and its mission. He has further supported African and Black students in the Harambee Defined Residential Community as a resident assistant.

Harrell’s contributions to the sport management department followed his values in other ways. His work in the Laboratory of Inclusion and Diversity in Sport Research involved compiling data on NBA and WNBA players, extrapolating trends and analyzing any discrepancies in the way ESPN talked about certain athletes. As executive director of the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management Career Fair—the country’s largest, free in-person sport management career fair—he oversaw the recruitment of more than 55 organizations and teams to present career opportunities to 450-plus students.

Throughout college, he has won multiple grants and awards, including the McCormack Diversity Fund Scholarship, and held internships with the Wasserman Sports Agency, the Hartford Yard Goats and more.

After graduation, Harrell will work for Fenway Sports Management as an associate in Corporate Partnership Sales, serving Fenway Sports Group’s portfolio, which includes Liverpool Football Club, the Boston Red Sox and LeBron James.

 

Laleh Lea Panahi, of Marlborough, a Commonwealth Honors College student, earned dual degrees in operations and information management and journalism.

Image

Passionate about familial welfare and prison reform, Panahi has dedicated her college career to foster care advocacy. She interned at Friends of Children, where she helped develop financial literacy lessons for youth exiting the juvenile justice and foster care system, enabling them to reach financial independence. Under the guidance of Professor Razvan Sibii, Panahi examined the efficacy of nonprofit and governmental interventions in reducing the foster care-to-prison pipeline in her honors thesis, “Systemic Origins of Adult Incarceration: A Youth Trajectory Analysis.”

She has been involved in other independent honors research studies as well, one of which highlighted the impact of performance artists in protesting the subjugation of women. This research led to her acceptance as a teaching artist at the Arts Integration Studio in Holyoke, where she led multigenerational art lessons for children and older people affected by the foster care system.

Panahi served as the arts and living editor of the Massachusetts Daily Collegian since her sophomore year, and she leveraged her position as a Pilates instructor to fundraise for Craig’s Doors and Amherst Survival Center during her classes.

Since June 2024, she has interned as an offer management and cybersecurity analyst at Schneider Electric. She will continue in this role after graduation.

 

Ridha Fazal Alam, of Shrewsbury, a member of the Commonwealth Honors College (CHC) and International Scholars Program, graduates with a degree in biology and a certificate for demonstrating global competencies.

Image

Alam won multiple awards while at UMass Amherst, including the Sherwood-Delaney Scholarship for outstanding achievement in STEM and the CHC Research Assistant Fellowship. The latter enabled her to conduct research under Professor Rafael Fissore in the veterinary and animal science department, where she studied the effects of calcium channel knockouts on fertility and embryo development in mice. She embarked on her own independent research while studying abroad at Oxford University, analyzing the correlation between PLCzeta deficiency in sperm and clinical pregnancy rates in couples undergoing assisted oocyte activation.

An exceptional leader with a desire to bring together diverse cultures, she began serving on the South Asian Student Association executive board as a freshman, becoming president in her senior year. As well as organizing large-scale events, she led the association’s first Charity Ball, raising nearly $3,000 for a Boston-based South Asian humanitarian organization.

Passionate about social justice, Alam restarted Students Together Opposing Prejudice in Shrewsbury, which fosters open-mindedness and curiosity among middle school students, and was featured in the Community Advocate. For her efforts, she participated in the inaugural Shrewsbury Town DEIB Panel. 

After graduation, Alam plans to gain clinical experience before applying to medical school.

             

Ryan Anthony Bahlous-Boldi, a Commonwealth Honors College student and computer science major, was born in Boston and attended high school in Dubai.

Image

Bahlous-Boldi got started on research at a very early stage: With the support of his UMass Amherst research mentors, Professor Lee Spector and Professor Scott Niekum, he has played a significant role in contributing to our understanding of artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning. He has published numerous papers, including a co-first author journal article, first author conference/workshop papers, and first author poster papers. For this work, he has traveled around the world to represent UMass Amherst at conferences in Lisbon, Portugal; Melbourne, Australia; New Orleans; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Vancouver, Canada. His research contributions resulted in his being selected as a Goldwater Scholar and as a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Pioneer at the international ACM/IEEE HRI ’25 conference. 

Concurrent with his studies, Bahlous-Boldi rebranded the UMass Machine Learning Club into MassAI, the university’s leading artificial intelligence club, where he served as president for two years. At the 2022 ProjectX ML Research Competition at the University of Toronto, he led a team of undergraduate students to victory, with Team UMass winning a cash prize of $20,000 for their paper “Recommendation Diversity Worth Caring About.”

Balhous-Boldi will pursue a doctoral degree in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

 

Shakira Keyla Affoué Ebian, a Commonwealth Honors College student, was born in Boston and raised in Côte D’Ivoire, West Africa. She graduates with a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology. Her honors thesis is about the growth dynamics and infectivity of Crithidia bombi, a gut parasite in bumblebees.

Image

Ebian sought a UMass Amherst community where she would feel represented. Drawn to the Haitian American Student Association due to commonalities between Haiti and her home country, she increased its dance team membership by 70% over a semester. Her interests in supporting underrepresented students led to her tenure as vice president of the Minority Association of Pre-Medical Students (MAPS), where she co-organized the second Pre-Health Formal and co-coordinated a mentorship program that paired 70-plus students. Before this role, she was MAPS’s fundraising chair and helped raise money for key initiatives.

She gained a deeper understanding of healthcare disparities in UMass Chan Medical School’s Baccalaureate MD Pathway Program. In her first year, she worked with a team of five to win first place for their presentation on inequities in vitamin D deficiency among African Americans in Massachusetts.

Following graduation, Ebian will work as a medical assistant for a private urgent care company while seeking an additional clinical research opportunity in the Boston area. Her long-term goal is to pursue medical school and become a plastic surgeon or anesthesiologist.

 

Tess Weisman, of Northampton, double-majored in psychology and sociology and earned a certificate in criminal justice.

Image

UMass Amherst has prepared Weisman to be a resilient and compassionate leader. As a first-year student, she joined the Student Government Association (SGA) as secretary of university policy. In this position, she collaborated with faculty and staff to ensure that students have no classes on Election Day, changing the academic calendar so that everyone has the opportunity to vote. She was later elected SGA president in her junior year, all while juggling her responsibilities as a resident assistant and teaching assistant.

Weisman also brought her people-centered mindset to the sociology department. Under Associate Professor Wenona Rymond-Richmond, she collected census data and calculated crime rates per Chicago neighborhood populations, with a focus on gentrification within neighborhoods and trends in housing reforms near low-income housing areas.

Outside of UMass Amherst, Weisman interned with the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, where she worked with the Juvenile Justice Unit to provide diversion for youth involved with the criminal justice system and at the Mental Health Association, helping clinicians provide therapy and trauma-informed recovery care to adults with co-occurring substance use and mental health diagnoses.

She will join William James College’s Behavioral Health Service Corps, a yearlong program that will pair her with a job in the behavioral health-care field while taking classes toward a master’s degree. 

 

Jack Welch Scholars

Two students have been named Welch Scholars for 2025 and will receive merit scholarships funded by the GE Foundation. The award is named in honor of alumnus Jack Welch, who drew upon his UMass Amherst undergraduate education in chemical engineering to forge a legendary career as a business leader, serving for two decades as chairman and chief executive officer of General Electric.

 

Liliangel Alvarado Arias, of Lawrence, is graduating from UMass Amherst with a degree in operations and information management. A first-generation college student whose parents immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, she is proud of making her family’s greatest dream come true and grateful for the ability to attend UMass Amherst without worrying about student debt. 

Image

Highly motivated and passionate about business, Alvarado Arias qualified for the Dean’s List every semester and worked as a teaching assistant for the Isenberg School of Management course, OIM 301: Introduction to Operations Management, for two years. 

She juggled her academic responsibilities with multiple part-time jobs and supply chain and operations internships at food and drug retailer Albertsons Companies, Inc. and Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the country’s largest private investment banks. Alvarado Arias also serves as the financial coordinator for Student Bridges, a nonprofit agency at UMass Amherst that aims to improve access and success for underrepresented students on campus and in the surrounding communities.

Following graduation, she will join Boston-based e-commerce company Wayfair as an operational analyst. Alvarado Arias later plans to continue her education by earning a Master of Business Administration or Master of Science in Business Analytics.

 

Nare Parseghian, of Belmont, a Commonwealth Honors College student, majored in biomedical engineering with a minor in engineering management. 

Image

Over the past four years, Parseghian has embraced academic challenges by taking demanding electives and graduate-level courses, which have strengthened her technical skills and confidence as an engineer. Under the mentorship of professors Karen Giuliano and Frank Sup, she completed her honors thesis project in the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation, where she designed and prototyped a chest tube holder to assist nurses in improving patient care. 

Parseghian applied her engineering skills and gained invaluable real-world experience as a design quality engineer intern at Haemonetics, a medical device company in Boston, where she worked on a risk management project for a hemostasis analyzer, among other responsibilities. 

She has also served as president of the Armenian Students Association Executive Board since her junior year, fostering community among Armenian and non-Armenian students across the Five College Consortium as well as organizing meaningful cultural events, such as the annual khorovats party.

After graduating from UMass Amherst, Parseghian will pursue a career in the medical technology industry and further her education by attending graduate school.