YCA Holds End-of-Year Celebration and “Outstanding Contribution Award” Ceremony

On the afternoon of May 29, Yenching Academy held the 2025‒2026 End-of-Year Celebration and award ceremony for the 2025‒2026 Yenching Academy Award for Outstanding Contribution. YCA Dean Dong Qiang as well as Associate Deans Fan Shiming and Brent Haas attended the ceremony, which was co-hosted by Gabriel Ashdown (UK), Jonah Dunch (Canada), Iris Qi Hamilton (USA), and Ge Luo (Canada).

The event kicked off with a retrospective of the past year’s highlights. After that, the list of award winners was announced, with a citation for each awardee highlighting their contributions to the Academy. These individuals have fostered a more vibrant, multicultural community at the Academy through their dedicated work across different disciplines.

Winners of 2025‒2026 Yenching Academy Award for Outstanding Contribution:

Abdul Haey-ee Asim (USA), Matheus Bender (Brazil), Elliott Raymond Patrice Bize (France), Blake Adam Kravitz (USA), Krupa Chandra Sekhar (USA), Marva Jiaqi Shi (USA), Natalie Anne Lin Li Stott (UK), Wena Teng (USA), Xing Chaoran (China), and Yuan Sio Mei (Macao SAR, China).

Dean Dong Qiang and Associate Deans Fan Shiming and Brent Haas presented the certificates to the award winners in recognition of their contributions to the Academy’s work in the past year.

In addition to the individual awards, team awards were presented in recognition of YCA sports teams’ outstanding performance in PKU events, in which each team displayed remarkable sportsmanship.

Before the event ended, Matheus Bender (Brazil) from the GSU Executive Committee and Rana Ceren Kalenderli (Turkey) co-hosted the Superlative Awards segment. Unlike conventional scholarship or award selection, Superlative Awards consisted of inventive student-initiated titles presented to those deemed “YCA’s Best Smile” or “Most Likely to Be a Writer,” for example. The ceremony concluded on a cheerful note.

On June 5, 2025 Scholars and staff took a group photo in front of the PKU library. As their smiles shone like the mid-summer sun, the PKU campus witnessed the vibrance of their youth.