Forward Award recipients honored during Homecoming weekend at Memorial Union
On the eve of Homecoming 2026, the Memorial Union’s Great Hall filled with alumni, family, and friends to celebrate six rising stars from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The Wisconsin Alumni Association’s 2026 Forward Award honors graduates within 15 years of earning their degrees who live the Wisconsin Idea through service, discovery, and progress.
“There’s nothing quite like being in a room with Badger greatness,” said Erin Ryan ’07, MS’09, vice chair of the Wisconsin Alumni Advisory Council, as she opened the evening. Sarah Schutt, chief alumni officer and executive director of WAA, then introduced each recipient. Their work includes everything from mental health access, protection from exploitation, environmental research, new technologies, and medical treatments, to the governance of artificial intellegence.
Jessica Lyga ’14 is a senior strategic partnerships manager at the Freedom Fund, which supports more than 200 local partners working against forced labor and human trafficking. She began her path as a Wisconsin Idea Fellow in Ethiopia and has since helped mobilize more than $200 million for programs in over 20 countries. Lyga was at a Freedom Fund retreat in Scotland, so her parents accepted the award for her. In remarks her mother read aloud, Lyga said that for her, moving forward means “using what we learned to help create the conditions for others to move forward, too.”
Ryan Clarke ’14 is cofounder and chief scientific officer of Syntax Bio, a Chicago biotech company that uses a CRISPR-based platform to make stem cell therapies faster and more affordable. The company has raised more than $29 million. Clarke credited his UW training, including the lab of Professor Brian Pfleger, as the foundation of his work, and said he wouldn’t be where he is without “the willingness of so many people to be mentors.” Clarke discussed how his team is building the company to “deliver very affordable cell therapies to patients.”
Derek Ho ’18, MS’21, PhD’24, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, studies microplastics and builds tools to detect them. He also teaches the public about them through the classroom activity Plastic Panic, his nonprofit Plastic-Free Pals, and his social media persona, Dr. Microplastics. This was his first trip back to campus since graduating. Ho said the Wisconsin Idea is a philosophy he has carried with him to “take what we’ve learned, put it into practice, and use it to do some good.”
Katy Jinkins MS’17, PhD’20 is CEO and cofounder of SixLine Semiconductor. She solved a decades-old problem of how to align carbon nanotubes, which are so tiny that about 100,000 would fit across an eyelash, and she returned to Madison in 2022 to launch SixLine with her doctoral adviser, Michael Arnold. Jinkins said her UW years taught her that “progress is something that we create, not something that we wait for.”
Dakota Kaiser ’11 grew up in a town of about 1,200 near Wausau and was the first in his family to attend college. He returned to Marathon County in 2019 and cofounded Tall Pines Behavioral Health, which uses telehealth and hybrid care teams to bring mental health services to rural communities. Kaiser reminded the audience that the Wisconsin Idea depends on people investing in the university, and he said he hopes the award will inspire all of us “to reinvest back in our own communities.”
Patricia Paskov ’15 is director of standards at the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute and a research affiliate with RAND and the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative. She begins a part-time doctoral program at Oxford this fall. Paskov said her Madison education prepared her for a career that didn’t exist when she graduated. “Madison gave me the tools to pivot and the confidence that I could.” Today, she said, one question runs through all her work: “Does this do what we claim, and can someone independent check?” She also shared a hope that the UW will one day launch the world’s first frontier AI auditing program.
Closing the ceremony, Schutt noted that progress can begin “in a research laboratory, a rural clinic, a community organization, a start-up, an international partnership, or even an unexpected conversation.”
Read more about each recipient at uwalumni.com/about/alumni-awards/forward-award.
