The Yale Alumni Association Public Service Awards, are presented annually, recognizing sustained public service that is individual, innovative, impactful, and inspiring. The recipients are all those who have demonstrated service that draws on the Yale community and benefits the world beyond Yale.
This year, the Yale Alumni Association honors three deserving candidates, Yalies who have given back and paid it forward, for their commitment to public service, and passion for helping others.
The 2026 YAA Public Service Award recipients are S. Zelda Roland ’08, ’10 MA, ’12 MPhil, ’16 PhD; Alaaddin Ibrahimy ’24 MS/MPhil, ’26 PhD; and Irene Kim ’26. The winners will be honored at a ceremony this fall.
S. Zelda Roland ’08, ’10 MA, ’12 MPhil, ’16 PhD
Yale is honoring Zelda Roland, Founding Director of the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) at Dwight Hall and Director of the University of New Haven Prison Education Program, for her extraordinary commitment to expanding educational opportunity and strengthening communities in New Haven and beyond. She is an alumna of Yale College (BA 08) and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (PhD 2016).
Since founding YPEI 2016 as a program of Dwight Hall at Yale, Roland has worked to transform access to higher education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people across Connecticut. She began developing the program while finishing her PhD in Art History and Film Studies, without institutional support but while building a coalition of faculty, students, alumni, staff, and formerly incarcerated students who believed in her vision of a real, credit-bearing college-in-prison program at Yale. What began with a single credit-bearing Yale course inside prison has now grown into one of the nation's leading college-in-prison programs. Through YPEI and its partnership with the University of New Haven, the program now offers accredited associate and bachelor's degree pathways to incarcerated students, having served more than 170 incarcerated students across multiple correctional facilities while also supporting dozens of alumni returning home to Connecticut communities. In 2026, the partnership celebrated a historic milestone with its fourth graduation ceremony: the graduation of the first cohort of women earning associate degrees at the only college degree program available to women in any federal prison in the United States.
A scholar, educator, and advocate, Roland has dedicated her career to building bridges between Yale and the broader New Haven community and to tirelessly creating a movement that invests Yale’s resources in the leadership of incarcerated and formerly incarcerate students. In building her coalition of support, Roland has developed innovative academic partnerships connecting Yale faculty, students, and alumni with incarcerated learners, while creating new opportunities for civic engagement, research, teaching, and public service. Beyond the classroom, she has helped build a reentry framework that supports alumni as they pursue employment, continue their education, and contribute to their families and communities upon release. Under her leadership, YPEI has become a national model for rigorous liberal arts education in prison and for universities seeking to expand access to higher education as a public good.
“This program is not just about the credits and degrees we offer,” she said. “It provides a network of support, resources, and community that have the power and potential to change people’s lives and trajectories, while they’re in prison and beyond. It makes a generational impact, and it makes an impact inside prison, in our communities, and on our campuses.”
Roland serves as an affiliated faculty member in Yale's Education Studies Program, Ethnicity, Race & Migration, and the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law, as well as a faculty fellow of the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale. She also serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Communication, Film, and Media Studies at the University of New Haven. She has spoken about her work in venues including MSNBC, The Grio, CT Public Radio, and at invited talks and keynotes at MIT Sloan School of Management, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Yale Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Northeast Regional Conference. Through her scholarship, teaching, and public leadership, she has advanced the belief that access to education is fundamental to strengthening individuals, communities, and democracy itself.
Alaaddin Ibrahimy ’24 MS/MPhil, ’26 PhD
Yale is honoring Alaaddin Ibrahimy for his commitment to building bridges between refugee communities, academic institutions, and public service through sustained leadership, community engagement, and advocacy. Throughout his time at Yale, Alaaddin dedicated himself to improving the lives of refugee and immigrant families in New Haven by combining direct service with research, advocacy, and organizational leadership. His work reflects a belief that meaningful change begins by listening to communities, earning their trust, and creating opportunities that empower others to succeed.
Growing up in Afghanistan, Alaaddin experienced firsthand how access to education, healthcare, and the support of others can shape a person’s future. Having benefited from communities that invested in his own journey, he has sought to create those same opportunities for others. While pursuing his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Yale, he found that opportunity through Elena’s Light, a refugee-led nonprofit organization serving refugee women, children, and families throughout Greater New Haven. What began as volunteering at community events soon grew into a long-term commitment to the organization. Over the past several years, he has led community health initiatives, organized educational workshops, supported hygiene and donation drives, helped strengthen partnerships between refugee communities and local healthcare organizations, and worked to ensure that refugee families have access to the resources and support needed to build successful new lives.
Working alongside community leaders and collaborators from the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine, Alaaddin helped lead the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) project through Elena’s Light. The initiative sought to identify barriers refugee communities face in accessing healthcare while ensuring that refugees themselves helped shape both the research process and the solutions that emerged from it. His service also extended beyond New Haven through advocacy efforts with state and federal policymakers, where he worked to elevate the voices of refugee families and advance more equitable healthcare and integration policies.
Alaaddin now serves on the Board of Directors of Elena’s Light, where he helps guide the organization’s strategic direction while leading grant writing and fundraising initiatives that support refugee health, education, and integration. Throughout his years at Yale, he also served as a McDougal Fellow, organizing programs that fostered connection and belonging among graduate students, and as Treasurer of the Graduate Student Assembly, helping support initiatives that enhanced graduate student life across the university. Across these roles, he has remained committed to creating communities where people feel supported, included, and empowered to contribute.
Alongside his service, Alaaddin completed his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, where his research focused on developing advanced PET imaging methods to improve drug development and targeted cancer therapies. While his scientific work has taken him into laboratories and collaborations around the world, he considers his engagement with the New Haven community to be one of the most meaningful parts of his Yale experience.
Reflecting on his service, Alaaddin says: “The opportunities I have been given were made possible because others believed in me. Volunteering with Elena’s Light is my way of paying that forward – helping create the same sense of opportunity, belonging, and hope for refugee families building new lives.”
After graduating from Yale, Alaaddin joined McKinsey & Company as a consultant in the firm’s Boston office while remaining an active member of Elena’s Light’s Board of Directors. He looks forward to continuing to support refugee families in New Haven, strengthening Elena’s Light’s partnership with Yale, and helping expand opportunities for future generations of refugees. As he begins the next chapter of his career, he hopes to carry the same commitment to service, leadership, and community that defined his years at Yale.
Irene Kim ’26
Yale is honoring Irene Kim for her sustained commitment to criminal justice reform and to supporting incarcerated and formerly incarcerated communities in New Haven and beyond. Across her work, Irene has been guided by a belief in listening to the people closest to the justice system and building alongside them. She is the founder of the Justice Education Project, one of the first national youth-led organizations for legal reform, and of Project RESTOR, a reentry support organization for justice-involved women in New Haven.
Before arriving at Yale, Irene founded the Justice Education Project, which grew from a single effort to make the legal system more understandable to young people into a national organization active across 20 states. Through JEP, she built a chapter-based curriculum that guided high-school students through the criminal justice system month by month, covering topics from sentencing and bail to wrongful convictions and the school-to-prison pipeline through peer-led discussion. She co-authored a 130-page guide advocating for legal system reform and coordinated the donation of roughly 20,000 books and hygiene products to 13 partner prisons nationwide.
She later extended this work as a research assistant to Professor Miriam Gohara, spending two years conducting archival research on the historical and legal structures that shape carceral harm. Her research drew on sources ranging from the 1982 President's Task Force on Victims of Crime to the history of Black women's anti-violence activism and included an archival memo on the proposed 1831 college for Black students in New Haven and its legacy for education in the city.
At Yale, Irene founded Project RESTOR, a Dwight Hall–affiliated organization supporting formerly incarcerated and justice-involved women in New Haven. The initiative grew out of her work with the Project MORE Reentry Center, which highlighted the particular challenges women face in reentry. Rather than begin with programming, Irene first spent months building relationships with community organizations and justice-involved individuals across New Haven, listening closely to what people identified as their own most pressing needs and shaping the organization around them. In February 2026, Project RESTOR convened roughly 100 justice-involved individuals and Yale students for a gathering centered on reentry support, health, and safety.
Reflecting on her work, Irene says, "I've learned the most from the people I've met and the conversations we've had. This organization is really an effort to put that into practice. It's been most impactful seeing it start new conversations among the people we've brought together."
Beyond Project RESTOR, she has served as a Communication and Consent Educator and directed the Yale International Relations Leadership Institute, expanding access to global affairs education for high school students. Her interests have also reached into national policy and emerging technology. She interned at the White House National Economic Council and studied artificial intelligence through Yale's Schmidt Program on AI and National Power, examining the ways new technologies intersect with security and governance.
Irene graduated from Yale College in May 2026 with a B.A. in Global Affairs and is now working at J.P. Morgan in its New York office. She remains actively involved in advising Project RESTOR as it continues its work in New Haven.
