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AAHHE Doctoral Student Award
The AAHHE Doctoral Student Award recognizes doctoral students who aspire to join the academy and demonstrate their academic accomplishments and servant leadership at their university. 2026 AAHHE Doctoral Student Award Recipient
Armando Lizarraga Armando Lizarraga, from Inglewood, California, is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Higher Education Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin. His academic and professional journey has been shaped by his work with Project MALES, the Texas Prison Education Initiative, and Texas Appleseed, which have guided his focus on equity-driven research, public scholarship, and praxis in higher education. Rooted in his experiences growing up in a working-class, Black, Brown, and immigrant community and navigating higher education from the margins, Armando’s dissertation examines the intersections of gender, incarceration, financial aid, and postsecondary access. Centering the perspectives of formerly incarcerated women, he analyzes how financial aid, student debt, and carceral policies influence reentry and educational paths. Through this work, he advocates for policies and practices that humanize justice-impacted students and expand educational access beyond carceral boundaries. Armando’s work has received support from The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS), the Bard Prison Initiative, AAHHE, the ECMC Foundation, and the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education (TACHE). Outside academia, he remains grounded as a son, brother, tío, friend, mentor, and educator. List of Past Doctoral Student Award Recipients:
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