Do you know where your high school diploma is? How about your university transcript? 

In times of war and conflict, education-related and professional documents get left behind, lost or destroyed making if difficult if not impossible for refugees and other vulnerable people to enroll in higher education or find work.

This month’s guest on Face to Face With Chancellor May is a student who came to UC Davis to help refugees preserve their access to higher education — all while completing her own studies.

Dheera Dusanapudi is a junior studying international relations and religious studies, and works as the student lead for the Article 26 Backpack, a program that offers refugees face-to-face counseling and a cloud storage platform to preserve important records like transcripts and diplomas.

Human Rights Educators USA, or HRE USA, has named Keith David Watenpaugh, professor and founding director of Human Rights Studies at UC Davis, the recipient of its O’Brien Award for individual achievement for 2021.

Concerned by recent reports of official documents being destroyed at security checkpoints due to the shift of power in Afghanistan, UC Davis professor Keith David Watenpaugh found it critical to help students preserve their academic achievements under the Taliban. So this summer, Watenpaugh and a team of interns at the university quickly implemented a Dari/Farsi version of the Article 26 Backpack tool to remedy this issue.