HDOSE Recognizes 2026 Graduate Student Excellence Award Recipients
The University of Florida’s School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education (HDOSE) proudly announces the recipients of the 2026 Graduate Student Excellence Award, honoring eight outstanding graduate students for their exceptional achievements in coursework, research, and service.
Representing each of the school’s four program areas, the 2026 awardees exemplify the academic excellence, research productivity, leadership, and community engagement that define HDOSE’s mission. The 2026 awardees are:
- Counselor Education: Ledian Linares and Kirsty Houston
- Educational Leadership and Policy: Savannah Butler and Amber Hatch
- Higher Education Administration: Lechen Li and Luzmi Valenzuela
- Research and Evaluation Methodology: Quian Shen and Yue Xu
This award recognizes graduate students who demonstrate excellence across multiple dimensions of their academic journey. Each recipient was nominated by faculty and selected for their commitment to advancing knowledge, supporting peers, and contributing meaningfully to their field.
HDOSE Associate Director, Dr. F. Chris Curran, noted “Our students are changing lives, improving education systems, and innovating in research. Each of this year’s awardees exemplifies our School’s commitment to using evidence to enhance human potential and educational growth”
The HDOSE Graduate Student Excellence Award reflects HDOSE’s ongoing commitment to fostering a vibrant and impactful academic environment. These students stand as examples of what it means to lead with purpose and integrity and are examples of the emerging researchers and practitioners that make HDOSE a leader in graduate education.
Awardee Profiles in the Words of their Faculty Nominators
Ledian Linares, Counselor Education
Ledian has demonstrated outstanding commitment to student learning, professional development, and service to our program, making him a strong candidate for a graduate student award. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Instructor of Record, he has taught multiple sections of SDS3473/MHS3930 A Guide to College and Human Sexuality and currently teaches two sections of SDS3482 Stress and Anxiety Management. In these roles, he has consistently demonstrated professionalism, strong organizational skills, and thoughtful engagement with students while managing course responsibilities such as updating materials, evaluating student work, and providing timely, supportive feedback. In addition to his instructional work, Ledian has volunteered his time to the counselor’s education program by leading counseling growth groups, further demonstrating his initiative and commitment to his development as a counselor. Ledian also serves on the board of Chi Sigma Iota’s Beta Chapter (counseling academic and professional honor society) in the role of Marriage and Family track coordinator. Overall, Ledian’s reliability, initiative, willingness to participate, and dedication to both teaching and student development exemplify the qualities recognized by the HDOSE Award for Excellence.
Kirsty Houston, Counselor Education
Kirsty exemplifies the integration of scholarly rigor, clinical skill development, and service that this award seeks to recognize. As a master’s student in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, she has distinguished herself through her contributions to suicide prevention, research, and clinical training. She currently serves as lab coordinator for the H.O.P.E. Lab, whereby she supervises and trains new graduate student members, organizes and communicates data collection needs as part of our clinical trial Project HOPEFUL (which requires daily tracking and daily communication), and contributes to the preparation of peer-reviewed manuscripts. Her work has already resulted in a first-authored journal article examining an 8 week treatment designed to reduce loneliness and suicidality among community-dwelling older adults. She has presented at multiple national conferences and represented the full grant team at a federal grantee conference due to her sophisticated understanding of each and every part of the trial. What distinguishes Kirsty even further is her character. She brings humility, diligence, and a strong other-focused orientation to all those she works with. Kirsty has the patience, fortitude, and curiosity necessary to excel as both a clinician and scholar, while consistently approaching her work with empathy and a commitment to improving mental health outcomes. Her training in suicide intervention (i.e. ASIST, which she has taken 3x; suicide to HOPE; on track to take CAMS this spring), Psychological First Aid, and trauma-informed approaches reflects her dedication to developing the competencies necessary to serve individuals experiencing significant distress beyond that which is required in her training program. Kirsty represents the very best of our program—she is growing into a sincere scholar practitioner, who provides compassionate care, and collaborative leadership—and we strongly believe she is an outstanding choice for the HDOSE Outstanding Master’s Student Award.
Savannah Butler, Educational Leadership and Policy
Savannah Butler is an M.Ed. student whose engagement, leadership, and academic excellence embody the HDOSE mission to cultivate evidence‑based leaders who enhance human potential and educational growth. In her coursework, Savannah has consistently demonstrated outstanding performance, thoughtful collaboration, and a strong ability to integrate theory with practice. She also actively contributes to the intellectual community through the Education Policy Research Center Brown Bag Series and represented the program with distinction at the Early Childhood Institute in Tallahassee. Working two professional jobs, she leverages her real-world experience to enrich class discussions and elevate the learning environment for peers. Her strong presentation skills, eagerness to learn, and commitment to both college activities and the broader field make her an exemplary candidate for the Graduate Student Award for Excellence.
Amber Hatch, Educational Leadership and Policy
As a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. program in educational leadership and policy, Amber Hatch brings methodological sophistication to bear on pressing issues in education. Her dissertation focuses on developing and applying a theoretical framework that synthesizes public policy studies, educational ethics, and philosophy to evaluate policy in education. She has presented on and published articles on a number of topics, including the impact and potential of GenAI in education, the relationship between educational scholarship and the law, and educators’ legal literacy. Amber also played an essential role as a founding student in the Professional Consulting in Educational Environments course, where she was a consistent leader in the classroom, and she represented the college with distinction among community stakeholders. As part of her work during and after the class, she has been actively engaged with local nonprofits, literacy agencies, and other groups supporting students in the community.
Lechen Li, Higher Education Administration
HEAP PhD candidate Lechen Li is recognized for the HDOSE Graduate Student Award in recognition of his outstanding research. Over the past year, he has demonstrated exceptional dedication and academic excellence, publishing three peer-reviewed journal articles and participating in four conference presentations in 2025 alone. His research momentum continues into 2026, with three additional conference presentations already accepted and two manuscripts in revision. He is expected to graduate in summer 2026 with a PhD in higher education with a concentration in educational policy, and his hard work deserves a recognition.
Luzmi Valenzuela, Higher Education Administration
Luzmi Valenzuela is a second-year master’s student in Student Personnel in Higher Education. Luzmi embodies not only academic excellence but also leadership, service, and commitment to the profession. She serves as co-president of the Higher Education Student Association (HESA). HESA has created professional development workshops, community-building activities, and social events. Luzmi has been actively engaged with NASPA (National Association of Student Personnel Administrators) serving on the 2025 & 2026 NASPA Undergraduate Student Conference Team and as the 2025 NASPA Annual Conference Graduate Intern. She also presented at the NASPA Region III Summer Symposium: Chong, A., Chu, Z., & Valenzuela, L. (2024). Cultivating Tomorrow’s Student Affairs Leaders: Nurturing Students’ Potential Through Effective Mentorship with NASPA’s Undergraduate Fellows Program (NUFP).At UF, Luzmi works in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Academic Advising Center, completed her practicum with the Office of Community and Belonging, and interned with Freedom to Learn at Santa Fe College and the First-Year Florida Transition Programs at UF. Her service to the University of Florida includes UF Graduate Student Union Assembly Panelist, First Year Florida (First Year Seminar Course) Co-Instructor, Student Conduct & Conflict Resolution Committee Member, and UF Student Personnel in Higher Education Visiting Days Logistics Co-Chair.
Qian Shen, Research Evaluation Methodology
Qian Shen is a 3rd-year Ph.D. student in REM who focuses on applying data science, natural language processing, machine learning, and psychometric methods to educational and social science problems. His recent work has resulted in peer-reviewed publications and conference proceedings on topics such as predicting higher-order questioning in collaborative problem-solving, multimodal synthetic data generation for low-resource-language translation, the development of generative AI tools to support children’s oral reading fluency, and a data mining study of academic publication retractions in the twenty-first century.
Yue Xu, Research Evaluation Methodology
Yue Xu is a doctoral candidate in REM who has excelled in academic performance and research dissemination. Her research area is in educational measurement, and specifically moving toward issues of measurement validity when using AI for assessment scoring. As examples of her achievements, she published her masters thesis in a top educational measurement journal, and collaborated on a research paper that won a state level award for distinguished research. As Yue works on her dissertation, the REM program is pleased to recognize her achievements to date and looks forward to being a part of her future accomplishments.
About HDOSE
HDOSE faculty research and teach the foundations and structures of educational and community systems for people to thrive in their learning and development. We cultivate researchers, leaders, counselors, and administrators, empowering them to make evidence-based decisions that enhance human potential and educational growth.
To learn more about HDOSE degree programs, click here.
Note. This HDOSE highlights story was written using generative AI-assistance.