2025 Centennial Achievement Awards Honor Four Students
Congratulations to four students — two from the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and two SBS-affiliated — selected to receive a 2025 Centennial Achievement Award.
This year’s College of SBS awardees are Spencer Metz, a major in law and minor in economics. Spencer's involvement also includes research and teaching assistantships — among them, work in the School of Government and Public Policy.
Also honored is Jazzie Terrell, a Ph.D. student in rhetoric, composition and the teaching of English. Jazzie works as a graduate teaching associate teaching writing courses and focuses their teaching and research on inclusive education and writing that supports marginalized communities.
The College of SBS-affiliated recipients are Mourad Abdennebi, a Ph.D student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, a Graduate Interdisciplinary Program. Mourad has served for three years as a graduate teaching associate in Arabic, contributing to curriculum development and cultural programming for the Arabic Flagship Program, in addition to extensive outreach with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Also honored is Angus Leydic, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching and served as a graduate assistant in the English Writing Program.
Centennial Achievement Awards are presented to undergraduate students who demonstrate integrity, and persistence and contribute to their community. The awards are also given to graduate students in recognition of their outstanding achievements and perseverance in overcoming obstacles. The awards are presented by the Division of Student Affairs and the Graduate College.
Below are student profiles from the Division of Student Affairs:
Spencer Metz
Spencer Metz hails from Wilmington, Delaware, and will be graduating with honors in the spring of 2026 with a Bachelor of Arts in law and a minor in economics. Spencer's path at the University of Arizona has been shaped by a range of experiences, with the most life-altering being the loss of his father during his sophomore year. Faced with the decision to transfer to a school closer to home or continue at Arizona for his remaining two years, Spencer chose to stay. He attributes this decision to the strong community and support system he found on campus, as well as the opportunities he still felt compelled to pursue.
As a senior, Spencer serves on the Undergraduate Advisory Cabinet, the Bobcats Senior Honorary, and as co-chair of the U of A's All Leadership Council. He is also the head citation editor of the newly launched Arizona Undergraduate Law Review and secretary of the Jewish Pre-Law Association, a student club he founded and previously led as president. In addition, Spencer is an active member of the Phi Alpha Delta Pre-Law Fraternity and Alpha Epsilon Pi. To become more engaged with the local community, Spencer has volunteered with Southern Arizona Legal Aid; an experience that helped strengthen his connection to Tucson and his commitment to public service.
Alongside these roles, Spencer has held multiple research and teaching assistantships in the School of Government and Public Policy, the James E. Rogers College of Law and the Eller College of Management. Most recently, he began research as a Mo's Policy Scholar at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. Having recently completed the Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) Junior Summer Institute at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy, Spencer plans to continue his education in law or policy, with the goal of entering the legal, policy or political sphere.
Jazzie Terrell
Jazzie Terell is a doctoral student at the University of Arizona in rhetoric, composition and the teaching of English. They hold a Master of Arts degree in rhetoric, composition and the Teaching of English, alongside two summa cum laude Bachelor of Arts degrees in English, and another in literacy, learning and leadership.
Throughout their education, they have utilized grants, fellowships and work-study opportunities to further their education.
Inspired by their father, they translate their real-world experiences into the classroom with teaching and research on community education, feminist teaching methods, disability studies and technical writing, with particular attention to how digital tools can serve marginalized communities.
This work is directly influenced by their lived experiences. They are the author of several papers about the teaching of writing with respect to different cultures and backgrounds, with one notably from Rhetoric Review about fighting racism on college campuses.
Their dissertation centers a portfolio project around archival recovery, digital literacy and zines. They are currently working as a graduate teaching associate teaching writing courses from basic and advanced composition to technical and business writing. In their free time, they participate in their community through volunteering with local non-profits that assist refugees and immigrants with Literacy Connects and Humane Borders.
They are committed to working as a scholar-activist that centers writing education on social justice and accessibility.
Mourad Abdennebi
Mourad Abdennebi is a doctoral candidate in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) Graduate Interdisciplinary Program at the University of Arizona, where he conducts research in the Second Language Lab under the supervision of Janet Nicol. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, and a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics from Texas Tech University.
Originally from Morocco, Mourad grew up in a richly multilingual environment shaped by Arabic, Tamazight, French and Spanish. A first-generation college graduate, he is the first in his family to earn both a bachelor's and a master's degree – and the only one to pursue a doctorate. His academic path reflects resilience and purpose: he began his Ph.D. during the COVID-19 pandemic while far from home, and in 2023 he confronted the devastation of an earthquake that struck the High Atlas village where he had previously served as a CorpsAfrica volunteer.
With ten years of language teaching experience, Mourad has taught Arabic, French and English across a range of educational settings. At the University of Arizona, he has served for three years as a graduate teaching associate in Arabic, contributing to curriculum development and cultural programming for the Arabic Flagship Program.
Mourad's research investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support adult second language learning, with a particular focus on vocabulary acquisition through multisensory input, embodied learning, gesture and visual stimulation. His interests also extend to bilingualism and the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into computer-assisted language learning. His research portfolio is strengthened by his roles as a research assistant in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience of Language Lab under Vicky Lai, the Arizona Applied Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Lab (AAPPL) under Miquel Simonet where he engages with interdisciplinary research that bridge linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and computational modeling.
Service has been a defining element of Mourad's work. As a CorpsAfrica volunteer, he led the design and implementation of a large-scale water pipeline project that brought clean running water to approximately 10,000 people across 200 families in a rural High Atlas community. At the University of Arizona, he has extended this service commitment through extensive outreach with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, giving presentations in K-12 classrooms, professional development workshops for teachers, and teaching an OLLI-UA course on North Africa and development.
Mourad has earned more than $53,000 in fellowships, research grants and awards, including first place in the 2025 WAGS 3-Minute Thesis Competition, first place in the 2024 GradSlam, and the NFMLTA-NCOLCTL National Research Grant. He currently serves as President of the Graduate and Professional Student Council (2025-2026), representing more than 11,000 graduate and professional students.
After completing his doctorate, Mourad aims to execute a productive research agenda that advances scientific understanding of second language learning while generating practical tools for language learners and educators. Central to this vision is his commitment to ensuring that educational innovations benefit not only global learners but also communities that have historically lacked access to high-quality language education.
Angus Leydic
Angus Leydic is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT). They earned their Master of Arts in languages, literatures and cultures, with a focus on theoretical and applied Spanish linguistics, from Illinois State University, and their Bachelor of Arts in Spanish literature and art history from Duquesne University. Raised in Pittsburgh, they are a first-generation American and a first-generation college graduate.
Developing from this multicultural perspective, their work and research seeks to improve the lives of minoritized people, with their current focus on LGBTQ+ people within larger social institutions. Angus has received multiple awards, including the Linda Waugh/SLAT Research Grant to fund their current dissertation project, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Stipend Award to support travel and research presentations for K-16 educators and administrators, and the prestigious Bilinski Fellowship for 2025-2026.
Their most recent projects are titled "Ontologically and Epistemologically Trans: Trans Being and Sense-Making in a Digital Gay Space" and "Queer and/or Trans Student Perspectives on Queering Classroom Materials." They previously served as co-chair for the 2023 SLAT Roundtable Conference and successfully secured the Professional Opportunities Development Grant to fund the event and host the international plenary speaker.
Angus has served for two years as the graduate student liaison to the SLAT Executive Council. They have held graduate assistant positions in the English Writing Program, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Department of Public and Applied Humanities. They have also worked in private K-12 schools teaching Spanish, U.S. history from an antiracist lens, and art classes. In addition, they have held positions as a case manager for foster care in Pittsburgh for Spanish-speaking youth and as a case manager for unaccompanied refugee minors in facilities associated with the Department of Human Services.
As a peer mentor for first-year SLAT graduate students, Angus helps foster community within an interdisciplinary program. They have also served as a teacher advisor for an LGBTQ+ student association during their time as a K-8 teacher and as a curriculum designer, developing sexual orientation, gender identity and expression (SOGIE) training for previous workplaces.
After graduating, Angus hopes to promote ethical research design and develop equitable teaching practices with students and educators alike.
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All images credited to Enrique Camou.