APAWLA's 2025 Rising Leader Award Recipients

APAWLA is proud to announce the recipients of our 2025 Rising Leader Award:

- Rebekah Hong, Class of 2025, University of La Verne College of Law and Public Service

- Katrina Zhu, Class of 2025, UCLA School of Law

- Leyna Quach, Class of 2026, Willamette University College of Law

- Kylee Joelle Ocampo, Class of 2028, University of San Diego School of Law

Our awardees were selected for their exemplary records of service and demonstrated capacity as future leaders in the legal community. We congratulate our four scholarship recipients, and look forward to supporting and celebrating them in all their future endeavors!

If you would like to celebrate with us at the Scholarship Celebration on July 19, 2025, please click here to RSVP.

Get to know our recipients by reading their bios below!

Rebekah Hong is now an alumna (Class of 2025) from the University of La Verne College of Law and Public Service. Rebekah was an active student leader as President of APALSA. Senior Staff Editor of the Law Review and Journal of Law, Business, and Ethics (JLBE), and Peer Mentor. She will sit for the July CA Bar Exam. After the bar, she will be a post-bar law clerk at the San Bernardino County District Attorney's Office. It is an honor for her to serve her community as a future public servant!

Kylee Joelle Ocampo (she/they) is a JD/MA Peace and Justice dual-degree student at the University of San Diego School of Law, where she serves as Vice President of the Filipino American Law Students of USD, Secretary of the National Filipino American Law Students Association, and Associate Editor of the San Diego International Law Journal. A proud first-generation, queer Filipinx-American from San Diego, Kylee is deeply committed to public service, uplifting AAPI communities, and advancing equity through the law. This summer, she is externing at the United States District Court of the Southern District of California right before she begins her Women, Peace, and Securities Fellowship for her Master’s program. Kylee is honored to receive APAWLA’s Rising Leader Award and hopes to advance justice through civil rights advocacy and culturally competent legal service within the SoCal region.

Leyna Quach is a third-year student at Willamette University College of Law. During law school, she served as the President of APALSA, Co-Chair of the SBA's Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee, and a student attorney in her school’s immigration clinic, where she represented clients in their asylum cases. Her interest in immigration law is inspired by her parents’ stories of immigrating during the Vietnam War. Over the summer, Leyna worked as a law clerk for the Children’s Law Center in Monterey Park. After graduating, she plans to practice immigration and family law. Before law school, she earned her degree in Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and worked at the Department of Justice in San Francisco. In her free time, she enjoys penpalling, trying new restaurants, and playing Pokémon GO.

Katrina Zhu is a recent graduate of UCLA Law, where she specialized in Critical Race Studies and Public Interest Law & Policy. During her time in law school, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Pacific American Law Journal and Community Outreach Chair of the Asian Pacific Islander Law Students Association. She interned at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Knight First Amendment Institute, and the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. She hopes to pursue a career in civil rights litigation, specifically with a focus on technology, privacy, and surveillance, and will be clerking in the Central District of California after graduation. Before law school, she earned her degree in Computer Science from Duke University and worked at Microsoft.