K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award
The K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award recognizes graduate students who show exemplary promise as future leaders of higher education and who are committed to academic innovation in the areas of equity, community engagement, and teaching and learning.
Recipients of the 2026 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award
Kelly Andrade
Higher Education, Rutgers University
Christabel Kanayo Anumenechi
Curriculum Studies, Purdue University
Katherine Kruger
Nursing, University of Michigan
Geidy Mendez
Political Science, University of California-Irvine
Jessica Ross
Indigenous Studies, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Li Zhou
Statistics and Data Science, Auburn University
Meet the 2026 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Awards Recipients
AAC&U announced the 2026 recipients of the annual K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award.
Award
Recipients of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Awards will be recognized at the AAC&U Annual Meeting in January.
The K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Awards provide financial support for graduate students to attend AAC&U’s Annual Meeting. The awards include travel, lodging, meeting registration, and a one-year affiliation with AAC&U, including a subscription to Liberal Education magazine.
For more information, contact Kathryn Enke at 202-888-4647 or kenke@aacu.org.
About K. Patricia Cross
The award honors the work of K. Patricia Cross, Professor Emerita of Higher Education at the University of California–Berkeley. Throughout her career, Dr. Cross helped the higher education community better understand our students, their characteristics, and their needs, and recognize what our responsibilities should be. Her groundbreaking scholarship paved the way for a legacy of work on age, socioeconomic class, gender, race, sexual orientation, and numerous other aspects of intersectional social identity.