2025 AAAS Award Winners

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 AAAS Awards. We look forward to celebrating you all in Boston!

Congratulations to Kong Pheng Pha, recipient of the 2025 AAAS Early Career Award. Dr. Pha is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Colleagues, students, and community members praise Dr. Pha’s passion and dedication as an educator. He has charted new territory in the fields of Hmong American Studies through interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to race, gender and sexuality from community experiences of domestic violence as sites of state intervention to cultural representations of the Hmong American community.  

Congratulations to Sunaina Maira, recipient of the 2025 AAAS Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies, Affiliated Faculty Member of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group and former Program Committee Member of the Middle East / South Asia Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. The nomination emphasizes effusive admiration for her activism and steadfastness in addition to the vast reach of her remarkable scholarship, extensive service to the profession, commitments to activism and community engaged scholarship, teaching, and mentoring junior scholars. Her contributions to the association are deep and long-standing and have directly resulted in the growth and enrichment of the association through the inclusion of Critical SWANA Diaspora studies and critical engagement of Palestine and Palestinian solidarity in Asian American studies.

Congratulations to LeiLani Nishime, our 2025 AAAS Excellence in Mentoring award! Dr. Nishime is a Professor of Communication at the University of Washington where she researches the intersection of Asian American identity, technology, and science. She has dedicated the bulk of her professional life to the extensive mentorship of graduate and undergraduate students. We are delighted to recognize Dr. Nishime for her impressive work towards the professional and personal development of her students. 

Congratulations to Colleen Lye for her Honorable Mention for the 2025 AAAS Excellence in Mentoring Award! Dr. Lye is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Moving testimony from many of her previous students demonstrated the extent to which Dr. Lye mentored her students’ intellectual growth and cultivated their academic passions. She demonstrates attentive care through her commitment to academic promise and rigor. We are delighted to recognize Dr. Lye for her fantastic contributions to the mentorship of her students.

Congratulations to Julia Popham, recipient of our 2025 AAAS Graduate Student Paper Award. Julia is a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder where she studies Asian American material culture and Japanese American incarceration. We are delighted to recognize Julia for her interdisciplinary work on the visual rhetoric of the incarceration camps.

Congratulations to Daniel Jin, recipient of our 2025 AAAS Honorable Mention for Graduate Student Paper. Daniel is a graduate student at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor where he studies U.S. sub/urban history and relational ethnic studies. We are excited to recognize Daniel for his impressive work on Asian American antiviolence activism in Boston.