Takunda Maisva, who earned his Ph.D. in biology from Syracuse in 2025, has picked up two honors for his dissertation work: the Alexander Gourevitch Memorial Award in Biology and Syracuse's All-University Doctoral Prize.

He immigrated to the U.S. from Zimbabwe as an infant, and by the time he started at Vassar College on a full-tuition QuestBridge scholarship, his mother was finishing her own degree, too, making them first-generation graduates together before he came to Syracuse in 2019. His dissertation actually spanned two different kinds of research, pairing lab work on how noise pollution affects cricket development with education studies showing that peer mentoring and co-teaching help first-generation and underrepresented students succeed in introductory biology. That education research was funded by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Inclusive Excellence grant, and he presented it at national conferences, published it in peer-reviewed journals and spent time training faculty and fellow graduate students in more inclusive teaching methods.

He is now a postdoctoral researcher at Howard University, the first HBCU to earn the Carnegie Classification's R1 research designation, continuing the same push for equity in STEM.