Celebrating Student Excellence

May 19, 2025

As the 2024-2025 school year draws to a close, join us in celebrating our dedicated students, including these outstanding leaders!

Thanks to our Student Leaders

This May, leaders of Berkeley Social Welfare student groups celebrated a year of building community and advocating for change.

group photo of the graduating student leaders wearing their medals on a blue carpet

2025 Student Academic and Achievement Awardees

The James Midgley Leadership Award

Chloe Decker

Chloe Decker represents the kind of social work leader that provides a remarkably impressive level of volunteer service, driven by a profound commitment to supporting her peers and vulnerable students. She takes on a tremendous amount of personal, professional, and academic responsibilities, and productively performs them with obvious joy and commitment to the greater good. Chloe has made a lasting impact through her mentorship and teaching experience, and has played an active role in shaping the learning experiences of young students by providing academic support, creating engaging lesson plans, and working closely with teacher mentors to foster inclusive teaching practices.

Social Welfare Community Service Award

Hakim Owen

Hakim Owen is invested in community-based projects and holds many positions throughout the Bay Area. He has gone out of his way to advocate for Underground Scholars and the phenomenal work they are doing to address systemic barriers and empower this community [of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system-impacted individuals in higher education]. Hakim can reflect on his service in the classroom by drawing connections to his lived experience and working with what is being taught.

Social Welfare Dean’s Award for Academic Achievement

Liming Jiang

In the opinion of the faculty, Liming Jiang is the graduating Social Welfare student who has achieved the greatest degree of academic performance among undergraduates. Liming’s hard work and visionary efforts embody the mission of the School of Social Welfare, and make a significant contribution to the social work community.

Excellence in Social Work Practice Award

Demetrius Esclovon

As an MSW intern at Sutter Bay Hospital – East Bay Advanced Care, Demetrius has consistently exceeded expectations through his professionalism, integrity, and unwavering dedication to advancing health equity. He has demonstrated exceptional clinical insight, cultural humility, and a trauma-informed approach that empowers vulnerable patients living with HIV/AIDS, chronic illness, and psychosocial barriers. His ability to engage clients with dignity while navigating complex systems of care speaks to a level of mastery well beyond his training. Demetrius is a natural leader, an advocate for social justice, a future force in the profession, and he exemplifies the very best of Berkeley's MSW program.

Elena Requena

Elena has proven to be an exemplary intern at Department of State Hospitals-Napa and a gift to the hospital’s social work department and the individuals they serve. She has shown keen attention and care to the patient population through co-facilitating groups, holding individual therapy sessions, collaborating with treatment teams, and she has worked diligently to learn hospital policies and processes.

Ralph M. Kramer Award for Outstanding Strengthening Communities and Organizations Student

Kevy Patricio

Kevy lives and breathes community. They continually embody what it means to be a social worker by standing up for their peers, organizing their peers around salient social justice issues, and carving out a welcoming space for everyone they interact with. Kevy's presence and contribution towards social justice has made a clear mark on individual MSW peers and the MSW program as a whole. Kevy is a strong thinker, always participating and present, and a strong writer. They are very passionate, committed, and they always have their eye on the bigger picture.

Social Welfare Dean's Award for Social Justice

Maribel Espinosa

Maribel leads with intention, empathy, and cultural humility. She consistently uplifts those around her through thoughtful relationship-building, organizing, and advocacy. Whether she is spearheading structural changes, programming cultural events, or creating intergenerational mentorship networks, her leadership is both impactful and enduring. As Co-Chair of the Latine Social Work Caucus, Maribel cultivated strong connections among alums, faculty, other departments, and students to build a vibrant support network. She initiated a Latine Caucus–Alum listserv to promote sustained mentorship, invited retired faculty to engage with current students, and co-coordinated culturally-rooted events that celebrated community and identity.

Social Welfare Graduate Award for Outstanding Capstone Project

Stephanie Chang

Stephanie's capstone proposes an outcome evaluation plan for the Korean Community Center, focused on the prevention and early intervention program, which provides culturally-relevant educational workshops on wellness and mental health and engages community members in preventative mental health counseling. Her mixed-methods outcome evaluation proposal describes meticulous methods to explore changes in self-rated physical and mental health and help-seeking behavior after receiving counseling. Stephanie thoughtfully considered the strengths and limitations of the methods and provides an excellent road map for Korean Community Center to conduct this evaluation in the future.

Thomas Weisbrich

Thomas developed an exceptionally well-written, well-crafted mixed-methods capstone designed to examine key efficacy and equity outcomes at his agency. He demonstrated outstanding nuanced knowledge of agency needs and visions for a continuous program improvement in his ambitious evaluation design.

The James and Khadija Midgley Dissertation Award

Monica De La Cruz

Monica truly embodies the spirit of the Midgley Dissertation Award and has consistently demonstrated intellectual curiosity, drive, and academic excellence during her time at Berkeley Social Welfare. Monica’s scholarship demonstrates her commitment to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice not only through her substantive focus on poverty, but also through the ways in which she embeds anti-racist and justice-oriented approaches into the research process itself.

Excellence in Social Work Writing Award

elia delphi

elia's scholarly paper used archival information to "read against the grain". elia used their undergraduate history major, combined with their MSW education, to create a very meaningful secondary analysis of a prior thesis focused on foster children in the mid-20th century.