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Kena Hazelwood-Carter

As president of UC Berkeley’s Graduate Assembly (GA), Hazelwood-Carter advocates on behalf of the over 11,000 graduate and professional students in more than 100 programs across the campus. The GA’s current areas of advocacy include basic needs security, wellness, protecting academic freedom, and strengthening a sense of community across academic units. She has also served as a student representative to the UC President’s Task Force on Preventing and Responding to Sexual Violence and Sexual Assault and as a member of the Graduate School of Education’s Committee for Equity and Inclusion.  

Hazelwood-Carter is a third-generation Berkeley graduate student, with family ties to the university going back to the 1940s. She is pursuing a doctoral degree in the Graduate School of Education and is a fierce proponent of educational equity. Her work focuses on how positive psychological constructs such as hope, mindfulness, and desire can be used in educational interventions to improve academic and life outcomes for students from traditionally marginalized and underserved populations. As a former graduate student researcher with the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies (TRUST) program in the College of Engineering, Hazelwood-Carter researched how integrating a mindfulness practice into enrichment programs within cyber security and electrical engineering fields impacted learning outcomes for underrepresented students. In her own research, Hazelwood-Carter focuses on how universal school-based trauma screening, culturally attuned safer sex curricula, and initiatives to increase parents’ enrollment of their daughters in school-based sexual education can be combined to improve young Black women’s socio-emotional health, sexual agency, and academic outcomes.

Hazelwood-Carter holds a B.A. in political studies with a concentration in race and ethnicity from Bard College and an M.S. in teaching English to speakers of other languages from City College of New York, CUNY.