2024 Alumni Awards

Daryl Marshke

Joy Isabelle Photo

Jarell Skinner-Roy ’11 PhD Candidate, Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, University of Michigan | Research Associate,

Adelaide Davis ’13 Senior Officer of Health Service Delivery and Operations, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) UW Major: History During a course on HIV/AIDS in the African studies department, Adelaide Davis realized she wanted to work in a health-related field. A UW study-abroad program in Cape Town focused her interest to working on the social determinants of health in Africa. At the same time, Davis was active on the Wisconsin Sailing Team. “Sailing as a sport has taught me so much,” she says. “You have to be able to adapt and stay in the moment, be very flexible, and be very analytical.” Those skills came in handy when Davis worked in various roles at the U.S. Department of State and the World Health Organization. She joined the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in 2019, and, shortly after, Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders (MSF). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Davis deployed first to Chad and later to the Democratic Republic of the Congo before security conditions deteriorated to the point that MSF was forced to pull out. Witnessing the community-wide impact of the MSF evacuation had a profound effect on Davis. She saw a significant need to strengthen community health systems to make them sustainable without being reliant on international aid. She returned to the IFRC and settled in Geneva, Switzerland, where she’s now a senior officer of health-service delivery and operations. She leads country-level efforts to grow and support networks of community health volunteers. “At the international level, we’re there to support however we’re needed, but it’s really about growing local grassroots capacity,” she says.

Campus Abolition Research Lab UW Major: French, Legal Studies

During Jarell Skinner-Roy’s first week as a UW undergraduate, a campus police officer stopped him and asked for his student ID, which hadn’t been issued yet. The officer told him that he looked suspicious and harassed him for several minutes. It was the first of many microaggressions Skinner-Roy experienced on campus as a Black man. A lifelong Badger fan who grew up in Madison, he often felt like he didn’t belong and considered dropping out. He credits his persistence to his close friends and his adviser at the Center for Academic Excellence, Linda McCarroll Stamm, who nurtured his passion for enacting institutional change. As an intern at the Dane County District Attorney’s Office, Skinner-Roy worked with young Black men caught in the carceral system. After graduation, he taught abroad in Benin, where he was deeply inspired by the collective spirit of his host community. He then worked for an education nonprofit in the Twin Cities supporting students of color while also serving on various nonprofit boards. His growing awareness of systemic racism and educational inequalities inspired him to earn a master’s degree in higher education from the University of Michigan in 2019. He’s now pursuing his PhD there, focusing on racialized policing on college campuses. “I think a lot about radical imagination, envisioning our institutions not as they are, but as they could be,” he says. “Imagining something that has never existed before is challenging, but it’s the first step toward making meaningful change.”

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