Quintin Gay ’24 and Kassandra Ciriza-Monreal ’26
Quintin Gay ’24 and Kassandra Ciriza-Monreal ’26 have received 2026–2027 English Teaching Assistant awards through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to teach abroad in the Kyrgyz Republic and Portugal.
They are among a record thirty-four UNC–Chapel Hill students and alumni who received Fulbright U.S. Student awards this year across twenty-three countries. Carolina has been named a Fulbright “Top Producer” of U.S. Students for sixteen of the last seventeen years.
Quintin Gay ’24
Quintin Gay ’24 of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has been awarded an English Teaching Assistantship in the Kyrgyz Republic, where he began his grant in September at Ala-Too International University in Bishkek.
The placement returns Quintin to Central Asia. Through the Russian Flagship Program’s Capstone, he spent a year in Almaty, Kazakhstan, studying Russian and Kazakh at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. During that year, he also worked with the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law.
“I’m excited to guide students in Kyrgyzstan in their English language studies,” he said, crediting the teachers who encouraged him during his own language learning.
A graduate of George Washington High School, Quintin earned two degrees with highest distinction from Carolina. One was a bachelor’s in public policy, and the other was a bachelor’s in Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures with a concentration in Russian language and culture. He was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and was a Buckley Public Service Scholar and an advocate with the Community Empowerment Fund. He also conducted global public health law research at UNC in affiliation with Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and the CDC. While at UNC, he worked at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education, first as an intern and then as a project assistant.
After graduating, Quintin held a fellowship with OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights media project, and worked as an analyst at Resonance Global. A longtime endurance athlete, he has announced at triathlons and running races across the country and works in race operations for The IRONMAN Group.
In addition to teaching, Quintin helps plan public cultural events, such as film screenings, that he hopes will “foster discussion around the shared values of the United States and Kyrgyzstan.” Outside the classroom, he’s taking advantage of what he calls Kyrgyzstan’s world-class terrain for trail running, hiking, and cycling.
He credits Morehead-Cain with preparing him for the work through Fulbright.
“Through my summers and Lovelace Fund for Discovery grants, Morehead-Cain gave me invaluable opportunities to build relationships internationally,” he said. “I’m now applying these cross-cultural skills to my work in Kyrgyzstan.”
Kassandra Ciriza-Monreal ’26
Kassandra Ciriza-Monreal ’26 of Asheboro, North Carolina, has been awarded an English Teaching Assistantship in Portugal. This fall, she joins Instituto Superior de Gestão (ISG), a business and economics school in Lisbon, where she will support English language instruction for the academic year.
Kassandra grew up in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She moved to North Carolina as a high school junior, learning English while completing her diploma at Southwestern Randolph High School. She then earned an associate degree at Randolph Community College before transferring to Carolina.
Kassandra calls education “the most effective tool to transform someone’s life,” and she sees languages as bridges, not barriers, to reaching it. That belief, she said, is what led her to apply to Fulbright.
She graduated in May with a bachelor’s in human and organizational leadership development, with honors and highest distinction. She also earned a second major in Romance languages with a concentration in linguistics, with highest distinction, and received the Larry King Award for the Study of Minority Languages in the Iberian Peninsula. Her honors thesis, advised by Dr. Yuliana Rodriguez, examined how multilingualism is defined, supported, and experienced in North Carolina schools.
Teaching English is familiar ground for Kassandra, who volunteered as an English teacher at El Centro Hispano and offered free English classes to learners of all ages in her hometown in Mexico. In summer 2025, she taught as an academic instructor with the Kenya Scholar Access Program. The program helps high-achieving, low-income Kenyan students prepare to apply to universities in the U.S. and Canada.
At Carolina, Kassandra built her leadership experience through Undergraduate Student Government; Amexcan, the first association for Mexican students at Carolina; and LÍDER: Carolina Leadership Institute. She also worked as a communications specialist and media assistant for the Institute for the Study of the Americas (now INSITE Latin America and the Caribbean), where she contributed to the Language Access Collaborative and the Latino Migration Project.
In addition, she planned and coordinated the launch of the StrengthsFirst initiative and the Learn to Lead website with the Office of Student Leadership. During her senior year, she was a John M. Belk Impact Fellow with The Hunt Institute, where she worked with the North Carolina Student Success Center on communication and language access strategies for the state’s fifty-eight community colleges.
Kassandra credits Morehead-Cain with helping her pursue her dream of “education without barriers,” a goal rooted in her own experience learning English.
“I was once a student who spoke only Spanish, with a lot of vision but one obstacle: I didn’t speak English. Now as an educator, I want more students in North Carolina and in other corners of the world to know they shouldn’t give up just because they haven’t yet learned the language they need to reach their goals,” she said. “Dreams come in many languages.”
