A dozen students chosen to represent SFSU colleges at Commencement
The student hood recipients will represent their academic colleges at the University’s 125th graduation ceremony May 21
Twelve outstanding graduates will be honored during San Francisco State University’s 125th Commencement ceremony, to be held at Oracle Park Thursday, May 21. They will represent their more than 7,200 graduating peers in the Class of 2026.
As part of a longstanding tradition, each of the University’s six academic colleges selects an undergraduate and a graduate student to represent their classmates and wear their college’s academic hood during the ceremony. Additionally, two of the hood recipients, one undergraduate and one graduate student, will each deliver a Commencement address.
More details about the ceremony are available on the Commencement website.
Undergraduate Speaker
Orlando Mayen-Castañeda
B.S., Physics (Astrophysics)
Orlando Mayen-Castañeda grew up listening to his mother’s stories about the night sky. Now he aspires to pursue a career as a bridge between the stars and community. A Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program solidified his career trajectory.
As a first-generation Astrophysics student, Mayen-Castañeda studied the chemical composition of stars at SFSU and then traveled to Chile for an REU program working with the NOIRLab (formally called the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) studying stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Beyond the science, he helped create an inclusive and safe community for students and mentors at the NOIRLab and was inspired by being able to positively impact others in this way.
At SFSU, Mayen-Castañeda served as a learning assistant in his department, gave planetarium shows and helped coordinate and gave talks for Noche de Estrellas, a monthly bilingual (Spanish-English) event inviting the community to the planetarium and observatory. He has also presented his research at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Baltimore. Over the years, Mayen-Castañeda received the Dennis Bennett Scholarship in Physics and Astronomy and the Michael and Greta McKinney Physics and Astronomy Scholarship and was most recently named the Department and College Honoree.
After graduation, Mayen-Castañeda will be staying at SFSU to complete his master’s degree to further refine his skills. He plans to continue his work with Noche de Estrellas and departmental outreach. After his graduate studies, he hopes to return to the NOIRLab to continue his work.
Graduate Speaker
Tanya Aghazadeh
M.S., Business Analytics
Tanya Aghazadeh graduates from SFSU with a Master of Science in Business Analytics, where she maintained a perfect 4.0 GPA and distinguished herself through academic excellence and analytical rigor.
She brings a strong interdisciplinary background in industrial and systems engineering, which informs her approach to solving complex, data-driven problems.
At SFSU, Aghazadeh served as a teaching assistant for a class on data mining, where she supported students in mastering machine learning concepts, analytical methodologies and real-world applications. She also contributed to the University community through the “Fun Friday” series, delivering presentations on navigating the MSBA program and successfully transitioning into the workforce.
Her academic work is complemented by extensive hands-on experience across a range of analytical projects. Her capstone project, conducted in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente, developed a dual-model analytical framework to explain and predict insurer-level enrollment growth in U.S. Medicare Advantage markets, generating strategic insights from large-scale real-world data. She has also developed expertise in machine learning, customer segmentation and data visualization using Python, SQL, Tableau and Power BI.
During her final semester, Aghazadeh secured a role as a financial analyst at the Surplus Line Association of California, where she applies data and financial analytics to support strategic, data-driven decision-making. Her journey reflects resilience, adaptability and a sustained commitment to excellence. She is passionate about leveraging data analytics to inform strategic decisions and drive meaningful, real-world impact.
College of Ethnic Studies
Micaella Ann Calvo
B.A., Asian American Studies; Race, Ethnicity and Health
As a daughter of immigrants, Micaella Ann Calvo has always taken her family and ancestors’ stories everywhere she goes as she navigates the world. From early on, Calvo understood the power that education holds as a form of liberation. That drove her zealousness in pursuing ethnic studies and teaching, cultivating the classroom into a space of safety, critical thinking and love.
While at SFSU, Calvo provided resources and referrals to the campus community at the Associated Students Women’s Center. Now the center’s director, she facilitated semester-long internships and hosted events all under the mission to provide support to misogyny-affected communities at SFSU. Along with participating in the Pilipinx American Collegiate Endeavor, Calvo has served her community through her time in Pin@y Educational Partnerships. Serving as a leadership coordinator and teacher, she taught Filipino American Studies at Phillip and Sala Burton High School, building meaningful relationships rooted in mentorship, care and trust, while fostering a classroom environment rooted in ethnic studies.
Ethnic Studies represents more than a degree Calvo earned in her undergrad career: It is something she plans to take with her as she continues her pursuit of serving youth and her community. Following graduation, she plans to gain experience as a classroom teacher and will further develop her skills outside of the Bay Area, expanding to the East Coast. She will also apply for teacher credential and Master of Arts programs in Education. Her long-term goal is to become an Ethnic Studies professor, where she can empower students through culturally relevant pedagogy, critical thinking and a deeper understanding of history, identity and resistance.
Isabella Esperanza Martinez-Bernal
M.A., Ethnic Studies
Isabella Esperanza Martinez-Bernal is a second-generation Chicana from Los Angeles raised in a blended household by two public school educators. Her passion for ethnic studies stems from growing up in the classrooms with her parents alongside their students.
She first graduated from SFSU in spring 2024, earning a B.A. in Communication Studies and Race and Resistance Studies with Cum Laude honors. Rooted in intentional and radical engagement with the campus community and the community at large, she is a proud member and alumna of the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), Movimiento Estudiantil para la Liberación de Las Americas de San Pancho (MELA) and Sigma Lambda Gamma National Sorority Inc.
With a focus on advocacy work, Martinez-Bernal is completing her second term as the vice president of Internal Affairs for the Associated Students Inc. Board of Directors, serving the diverse student body of SFSU. Martinez-Bernal’s research for her thesis focuses on the intersection of Chicana and Latina girlhood and student organization/leadership. Her plans after graduation include moving back to Los Angeles to pursue jobs in higher education and applying to Ph.D. programs.
College of Health & Social Sciences
Alex Aguilar
B.S., Nutrition and Dietetics (Dietetics and Nutrition Science)
After working many years in health care, Alex Aguilar is earning his first bachelor’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics. He previously worked as a paramedic and a physical therapy aid and currently works as an EKG technician at Sutter Health in Oakland. He is the first in his family to earn a college degree.
Through his years of experience in the health-care field, Aguilar has developed expertise working with culturally diverse populations, many of whom experience socioeconomic disadvantages and chronic health conditions. His desire to continue to work with and support these populations in a different manner led him back to school with the goal of becoming a clinical registered dietitian at a hospital.
Aguilar has a 4.0 GPA in his current program and was accepted into SFSU’s Dietetic Internship Program. His department celebrates his academic achievements but notes that his greatest strengths are his soft skills. Having had many years of work experience, he is generous in supporting his fellow students and is always collaborative. Faculty find him to be an active learner, engaged and a pleasure to have in class.
In addition to work, school and raising a young child, Aguilar finds time to be a volunteer firefighter and has dedicated over 1,000 hours to the Fremont Fire Department.
Juan Carlos Arredondo
MSW
Juan Carlos Arredondo is a Mexican American whose work reflects a strong commitment to culturally responsive care and use of bilingual services to reduce barriers to mental health support. In 2024, he received the CSU Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement, the highest recognition of student achievement granted by the CSU.
Arredondo currently serves as a therapist trainee at Casa del Sol, an outpatient mental health clinic in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, where he provides mental health services to immigrant families from Latin America. During his first year in the MSW program, he completed a social work internship at Manzanita SEED Elementary School, where he provided therapy to children and developed early intervention skills within a school-based setting.
He also earned his undergraduate degree at SFSU. During his SFSU tenure, he was awarded the highly competitive Willie L. Brown, Jr. Fellowship, which landed him an internship with San Francisco’s Human Services Agency. He also led a qualitative study highlighting the voices of the unhoused population in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District and presented the data at the 2024 Social Work Social Development Joint World Conference.
Arredondo lived in Mexico throughout his childhood, and his early experiences and challenges when relocating to the U.S. with his family inspired him to become a social worker. His experiences shape his dedication to serving immigrant communities with empathy, cultural humility and intention. He is especially committed to addressing the underrepresentation of Latino men in social work and hopes his work inspires other men to pursue similar paths.
College of Liberal & Creative Arts
Isabelle Luise Cruz Sena
B.A., French
Isabelle Luise Cruz Sena earned her B.A. in French with Summa Cum Laude honors, completing her degree in just three years while appearing on the Dean’s List every semester and working full time as a certified nursing assistant. Deeply engaged in both language study and health care, Sena brings exceptional cross-cultural awareness and empathy to her work, further enriched by her study-abroad experience in Paris and her volunteer service with Global Medical Brigades in Guatemala.
Now a patient care assistant at the Mission Bay Surgical Center at University of California, San Francisco, Sena combines intellectual rigor with substantial clinical experience. A graduate of the Class of 2025, Sena was selected as a 2026 undergraduate hood recipient. She is set to begin Columbia University’s prestigious Master of Science in Nursing program — an achievement that reflects both her academic excellence and her longstanding aspirations.
Sena is especially eager to continue integrating her interests in language, nursing and medicine as she takes this next step in her career. Through her academic distinction, resilience and commitment to service, Sena represents the very best of SFSU’s graduates.
Trinh Lê
MFA, Creative Writing
Trinh Lê is a lesbian poet, artist and educator of Vietnamese origin. They are a Marcus Recruitment Award recipient and the 2025 – 2026 Poetry Coalition fellow at the SFSU Poetry Center. They are one of nine aspiring literary leaders across the nation to receive the yearlong Academy of American Poets fellowship to support their career development.
Trinh collaborated across disciplines at SFSU, exhibiting their concrete poetry in the School of Art and starring in an experimental documentary with their original poetry in the School of Cinema. They have been a featured poet at readings across the Bay Area and have taught “The Craft of Poetry” and the “Art of Revision” courses to Creative Writing majors.
Trinh received the 2025 Black Mountain College Award from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics for their concrete poem, made in homage to the wire sculptures of nationally recognized San Francisco artist Ruth Asawa. Trinh was nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology and was a finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. In 2023, Trinh was featured in the Asian Art Museum for the “Bernice Bing: Open Call” exhibition.
Trinh is a core volunteer and community archivist at the Bay Area Lesbian Archives in Oakland. They have conducted research with the archives of Bernice Bing, Etel Adnan and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, exploring the nature of Bay Area women’s art and poetry in the 1970s.
Trinh received their B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where they were an undergraduate poetry fellow at the Arts Research Center. Trinh is the eldest of three daughters born in Berkeley to two Vietnamese immigrants, who, through their perseverance and sacrifices, make Trinh’s poetry possible.
College of Science & Engineering
Isis Raele
M.S., Geographic Information Science
Isis Raele’s work on and off campus has been informed by her connection and desire to support her Oakland community. Her Brazilian immigrant family has long considered the city their home. Her master’s thesis research — which was deeply personal — was as unconventional as it was necessary. Raele studied Oakland’s opioid overdose crisis using critical geography as her guiding framework and geographic information science (GIS) as her instrument. Raele lost loved ones to the overdose crisis and refused to settle with the narrative surrounding the overdose crisis in her beloved city. She recently presented her research at the flagship annual conference of the American Association of Geographers.
In addition to research accomplishments, Raele is graduating with a GPA of 3.95. She also served as a graduate teaching assistant in the School of the Environment. Outside of the classroom, she is committed to community harm reduction, distributing life-saving supplies and providing public health education.
At work, she is an advocate for labor and immigrant protections, being instrumental in developing workplace protections, securing facility closure during community-disrupting raids and fundraising for rapid response networks in the face of federal enforcement actions. Her direct-involvement approach ensures that her academic work is never just theoretical, but a true extension of her service to others.
After 23 years in this country and an arduous path to citizenship, Raele is celebrating a double milestone today: earning her master’s degree and becoming a U.S. citizen.
Graduate College of Education
Emma Holland
B.S., Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; Molecular Biology
Emma Holland started college in Massachusetts, passionately pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry. After a couple of life’s twists and turns, she found herself back home in the Bay Area working at Wings Learning Center, a school for kids with autism. There, she discovered a new passion in supporting her nonspeaking students and loved encouraging their ability to express themselves in meaningful ways. A semester after enrolling at SFSU as a Biology major, she added Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences as her second major, feeling more fulfilled by helping her students than she ever had at a lab bench.
Holland dedicated time to multiple corners of the field of speech language pathology. Since working at Wings, she has become a certified home care aide, providing in-home respite care to children with autism. She also worked in the Belmont-Redwood Shores School District as a substitute paraprofessional, helping students with disabilities. Her recent volunteer experiences include interning in a pediatric speech clinic with a focus on childhood apraxia of speech, as well as co-facilitating a conversation group for adults with aphasia through the Gray Matter Lab at SFSU.
In the fall of 2026, Holland will continue her journey towards supporting children with speech- and language-related disabilities by beginning a master’s program in Speech Language Pathology at San Diego State University. She hopes to help neurodivergent kids with autism and other support needs gain access to robust and functional communication through a combination of speech production and augmentative and alternative communication.
Jennifer L. Dudziec
M.A., Early Childhood Special Education
Jennifer L. Dudziec is a master’s and teaching credential candidate in Early Childhood Special Education at SFSU. Her interest in the field was piqued with a single community college class at City College of San Francisco in 2019, and it grew into a deep commitment to understanding how young children learn, connect and thrive.
During her final semester as an undergraduate majoring in Adolescent Development at SFSU, she took courses in Special Education that caused her to change the direction of her career. When a professor encouraged her to pursue a master’s degree, Dudziec took the leap. She returned to school with a toddler at home and a clearer sense of direction than ever before.
Dudziec’s commitment to the field has been recognized throughout her academic career, most notably when she was invited to introduce San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie at a State of the City event. She spoke as both an educator and a parent about early learning and family affordability. The experience reminded her how this work belongs in the broader public conversation. That same perspective, as both educator and mother, shaped how she understands child development, not only through research, practice and coursework, but through the lived reality of raising her daughter and welcoming her newborn son this spring.
At the heart of Dudziec’s work is a simple belief: differences are not deficits, children are capable and communicative, and meaningful learning happens through play, observation and genuine human connection. She looks forward to partnering with families, educators and communities to ensure that every young child, regardless of how they develop or where they come from, is met with the support and belonging they deserve.
Lam Family College of Business
Liza Kucherova
B.A., Marketing
Liza Kucherova was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. Since she was a child, she has been fascinated by marketing and strategy and its influence on the world. At 13, she thought about moving to the United States to study marketing. The goal felt distant at first, but in her senior year of high school she started to make it more of a reality.
Over three months, Kucherova navigated an intense application process: She traveled to multiple countries for language exams, completed COVID-19 vaccination requirements and attended visa interviews. Despite many sleepless nights, her persistence paid off when she received both her university acceptance and visa approval.
Her move to San Francisco marked an exciting but challenging new chapter. She didn’t know anyone and was separated from her family by a 10-hour time difference. Determined to adapt, Kucherova embraced a proactive mindset: opportunities must be actively pursued. She began working at the Student Housing Office, supporting over 4,000 students while managing high volumes of requests and solving problems in fast-paced situations. With guidance from mentors in Lam Family College of Business Career Services and the Leadership EDGE program, she discovered leadership opportunities and ways to make a meaningful impact on campus.
Kucherova found her community in the Marketing Association, where she later became president. She organized networking events connecting students with industry professionals and focused on helping peers explore career paths and gain practical experience. She also served as a student ambassador and was the Leadership EDGE marketing liaison, managing communications for student initiatives.
Her dedication led to a role as a digital marketing assistant for the Lam Family College of Business. In this role, she executed campaigns that reached thousands of students and drove engagement for key initiatives. As marketing coordinator for TEDx SF State, she helped generate over 800 registrations, turning strategy into measurable impact.
These experiences helped Kucherova secure a competitive internship at Applied Materials, a global leader in semiconductor manufacturing equipment. There she was one of only 115 interns selected to present directly to the company’s CEO — an especially meaningful milestone as an international student representing SFSU.
Today, she continues building at the intersection of marketing and innovation as a go-to-market intern at NexDiscovery, contributing to messaging, positioning and growth strategy in a fast-paced startup environment. Her journey has been far from easy, but every challenge has shaped her into someone who believes that anything is possible with hard work, curiosity, resilience and the courage to take risks.
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