Chancellor’s Committee on the Status of Latinos recognizes outstanding UIC community members

The Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Latinos established the CCSL Recognition Awards to acknowledge the hardworking and committed individuals who serve the Latine community yearly.

In addition to the 2025-26 recognition award winners, this year the committee also recognized one outstanding colleague to receive the CCSL Lifetime Service Award, whose career has made a lasting impact on the Latine community at UIC and beyond.

The recipients include:

• Gerardo Jimenez, civil service staff
• Alejandra Palacios, academic professional staff
• Eduardo Bustamante, faculty
• Rosa Mendoza, graduate student
• Karla Herrera, undergraduate student
• Teresa Córdova, Lifetime Service Award recipient

Read the remarkable contributions these Latine community members have made at UIC and in their community.

Undergraduate Award:  Karla Herrera
Herrera is a first-generation Latina student majoring in biological sciences on the predental track, dedicated to serving and uplifting the Latine community. Having immigrated from Venezuela and later lived in Panama, she has firsthand experience with situations many Latine families face when navigating new systems, which fuels her passion for advocacy and service. She serves as the Pre-Dental Committee Head and Treasurer for Mujeres en Medicina, where she creates opportunities and resources to support Latine students pursuing careers in healthcare. She is also actively involved in L@s GANAS, where she mentors students and helps connect them with research opportunities to increase representation in STEM.

Through her work as a dental assistant, she has provided culturally competent, bilingual care to Spanish-speaking patients, ensuring they feel comfortable and understood. Her long-term goal is to become a dentist who advocates for underserved Latine communities and improves access to oral healthcare. Through leadership, mentorship and service, Herrerra is committed to empowering the next generation of Latine professionals.

Civil Service Award: Gerardo Jimenez 
Jimenez is the director of human resources for the Chancellor/Provost Business Services Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he leads human resources strategy and service delivery in support of a broad portfolio of academic and administrative units. With over two decades of experience at UIC, he has held progressive leadership roles across human resources, finance and operations, shaping institutional practices that support both employees and students.

Throughout his career, Jimenez has been a dedicated advocate for the Latine community, using his leadership role to advance equitable hiring practices, mentor underrepresented students and professionals, and influence policies that promote inclusion. He has mentored numerous students, interns and early-career staff - many from Latine and other underrepresented backgrounds - helping them build confidence, gain professional experience and navigate career pathways within higher education.

Jimenez actively guides hiring managers to recognize and mitigate bias in recruitment and selection processes, ensuring more equitable access to opportunities. He also uses his voice in leadership spaces to advocate for policies that better support Latine employees and students, particularly in areas where institutional practices may unintentionally create barriers.

He has been an engaged member of the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Latinos since 2016 and has served on its executive committee since 2018, contributing to initiatives that strengthen employee engagement, professional development and community-building across campus. In this role, he has co-led workshops and programming focused on employee growth and inclusive workplace practices.

Jimenez has also worked and collaborated with the assistant vice chancellor for student engagement and support to improve institutional processes related to students' immigration status, advocating for more streamlined approaches to financial and administrative requirements. His efforts directly reduce systemic barriers and ensure that students can access opportunities with dignity and support.

Academic Professional Award: Alejandra Palacios 

Palacios is a Mexican-American advocate whose work is rooted in a deep commitment to advancing equity and justice within the Latine community. Having spent her formative years traveling between Morelos, Mexico, and Illinois, she developed a strong connection to her cultural heritage and a firsthand understanding of the challenges faced by Latine immigrant families. 

Her professional work focuses on expanding access to justice through direct legal services, community outreach and legal literacy initiatives that empower individuals to understand and assert their rights. Palacios is especially committed to mentoring the next generation of advocates by creating opportunities for law students to engage in meaningful, community-centered work. Her dedication is grounded in the belief that collective empowerment and culturally responsive advocacy are essential to advancing human rights for the Latine community. 

Graduate Student Award: Rosa Elena Padilla Mendoza 

Mendoza is a first-generation college graduate from Chicago's South Side and is the current president of the graduate chapter of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science at UIC. She is also the founder of the "Rosa Maria y Antonio" Scholarship through the Big Shoulders Fund, where she has personally contributed funding to support first-generation underrepresented high school students pursuing higher education.

She volunteers with the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico, addressing issues affecting Latina/o/x communities worldwide, including gender violence and public health education. Her collaboration on "Gender-based violence among high school students in the municipality of Xochitepec, Morelos, Mexico" was presented at the National Congress of Psychiatry in November 2025 in Zaragoza, Spain. She created a STEM after-school program on the South Side of Chicago for seventh and eighth graders to help students understand the "why" behind what they observe through hands-on experiments with real scientific concepts. They have designed and tested parachutes to safely land an egg, a solar-powered car and a wind-powered car. Through her scholarship, leadership and service, Mendoza serves as a powerful role model, demonstrating how scientific excellence and community advocacy can intersect to create meaningful, lasting impact within the Latina/o/x community. 

Faculty Award: Eduardo Esteban Bustamante, PhD 

Bustamante is an associate professor of kinesiology and nutrition at UIC, where he directs the UIC Healthy Kids Lab. His work centers on advancing health equity, with a sustained focus on Latino children and families. Through partnerships with parks, schools and sports-based youth development providers, Bustamante develops and disseminates culturally responsive physical activity and nutrition interventions designed to improve lifelong health. 

A hallmark of this work is the BUILT (Be Unstoppable in Life Together) Family Lifestyle Program, which has delivered bilingual, culturally tailored programming to hundreds of Latino youth and families across Chicago. He has contributed his health promotion expertise to the Great First Eight, an open educational resource designed to close racial and ethnic achievement gaps by focusing on early childhood. In an ongoing co-design project, he is partnering with Latino researchers, families and clinicians in Santa Ana, California, to integrate AI-mediated Spanish-language whole family health activities into a pediatric clinic. To date, more than 70 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral trainees have participated in his research and community-engaged programs, including dozens of Latino trainees. 

Bustamante's leadership extends locally and nationally. In Chicago, he serves on the Health Advisory Board of the Chicago Park District and the Board of Directors of Urban Initiatives, organizations that serve tens of thousands of Latino youth daily. Nationally, he has served as chair of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility Committee of the North American Society for Pediatric Exercise Medicine; chair of the Diversity Action Committee of the American College of Sports Medicine; director of the American College of Sports Medicine Leadership and Diversity Training Program; and American College of Sports Medicine Trustee for Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. In these roles and others, he has led national pipeline initiatives supporting hundreds of aspiring researchers and clinicians from groups underrepresented in science and medicine. He has also contributed to scholarship advancing Latino health and professional participation through authorship and editorship in peer-reviewed journals and presentations across the Americas. 

Lifetime Service Award: Teresa Córdova, PhD 

Córdova is the director of UIC's Great Cities Institute, whose mission is to link its academic resources with a range of partners to address urban issues by providing research, policy analysis and program development. Tied to the UIC Great Cities Commitment, the institute seeks to improve the quality of life in Chicago, its metropolitan region and cities throughout the world. She is also a professor of urban planning and policy in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. Córdova received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986.

As an applied theorist, political economist and community-based planner, Córdova approaches her work as a scholarship of engagement in which research, pedagogy and service are integrated. Throughout her career, Córdova has engaged with communities in and outside the university and is an expert in community/university partnerships and methodologies of engaged research. In addition to strategies for community and economic development, her work focuses on global/local dynamics and the impacts of global economic restructuring on local communities, including impacts of resource extraction. She has already written extensively in the fields of Chican@ and Latin@ Studies.

Córdova's work reflects a deep commitment to meaningful university-community partnerships and applied research that responds directly to community needs. Throughout her career, she has served in numerous leadership roles at the national, state and local levels, influencing policies with tangible impacts across Chicago and beyond. Her legacy is reflected not only in institutions and policy, but also in the generations of students, scholars and community leaders she has mentored. Córdova's work exemplifies the mission and values of the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Latinos.