I am honored to introduce this year’s Patricia Lynn Vermeulen-Tomocik (PLV) Scholarship recipient: Fares Nassar, a remarkable young leader whose integrity, resilience, and unrelenting pursuit of education embody the spirit of this award. Born and raised in Aleppo, Syria, Fares’s early life was marked by extraordinary challenges. As civil war swept across the country, he endured power outages, water shortages, missile strikes, and the loss of friends to both violence and migration. His family was displaced multiple times, and the world he once knew turned into one of survival and uncertainty. Yet amid the destruction, Fares sought light: through faith, through the hymns of his church choir, and through a…