Meet the 2026 DBIA-SW Scholarship Recipients

We're thrilled to share some exciting news. Each year, the DBIA Southwest Region awards scholarships and grants to students and educators who are passionate about design-build. This year's recipients stood out for their drive, talent and commitment to the industry's future.

Let’s introduce them:

Undergraduate Scholarship

Katalyna Searcy

Texas Tech University

Katalyna is a civil engineering major with an architecture minor, and she's already seeing design-build in action. Through her internship with Landgraf, Crutcher and Associates, she's worked alongside a design-build team on the Ector County Courthouse and Juvenile Center projects. In her essay, she wrote about what she's learned watching design and construction decisions inform each other in real time, and about her goal of bringing accountable, single-team delivery to public infrastructure in the underserved communities of West Texas.

Recognition of Excellence Scholarship

Eva Patton

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Eva is a Bachelor of Architecture student whose studio work has already put her inside the collaborative mindset design-build asks for. In one project, she and a classmate designed each other's homes within a single shared volume, trading turns on a digital model and building a scaled stick-frame model together. Her essay connects that experience directly to what makes design-build work: continuous communication and shared accountability from the earliest stages of a project.

Faculty Grant

Amy King Lewis, Ph.D., CPC, LEED AP

Oklahoma State University

Dr. Lewis founded the DBIA Student Chapter at OSU in 2025 and advises both the chapter and its student competition team. She's putting this grant toward two goals: deepening her own expertise through DBIA educator workshops and certification training, and bringing design-build to life for her students through industry speakers, site visits and hands-on pursuit simulations. She's also rebuilding three of her courses, Construction Law, Scheduling and MEP Systems, around design-build principles.

To all our recipients: Congratulations!

We're proud of you and excited to follow your journey.

And to our Premier Partners and generous sponsors: Thank you!

These scholarships simply wouldn't be possible without your support. You're helping shape the future of design-build, one leader at a time.

Want to learn more about our scholarship program?

Visit www.dbia-sw.org/scholarships.