Baron & Budd Announces Spring 2026 Mesothelioma Cancer Victims Memorial Scholarship Winners

Scholarship winners Bailey Davis and Matthew Moran share their personal stories about how cancer has impacted their lives.

DALLAS, August 21, 2026--The nationally recognized law firm Baron & Budd selected Bailey Davis and Matthew Moran as the winners of the Mesothelioma Cancer Victims Memorial Scholarship. Each winner will receive a $2,500 scholarship paid directly to the financial aid accounts at their universities. Applicants were asked to submit a written or video essay about how cancer has impacted their lives.

Bailey Davis was selected as the winner of the written essay contest after a competitive review by the Baron & Budd Scholarship committee. She is a student at Howard University with a major in psychology. In her essay titled "The Foundation of My Casita," she details how, as a child of a Guatemalan mother, she experienced the silent, aggressive toll of cancer through the sound of long-distance weeping. Phone calls would often come at the worst times, her mother's shoulders would slink, and it would become immediately clear that breast cancer took another one of her family members' lives.

"The most heartbreaking part of it all is that they didn't die because their cancer was untamable; they died because they were poor, isolated, and completely forgotten by the world," she writes.

Being from Guatemala, where half of the population lives below the poverty line and where in rural, indigenous villages, basic healthcare is a luxury, simple mammograms become a distant myth for people. Because of this, breast cancer does not get caught early but is only found when it has already consumed the body and a person is on death's bed. Because of these tragedies, Bailey has dedicated her life to providing health care and being the change her people need.

"I promise to be the hands-on change my people desperately need, whether that means building grassroots non-profits from the ground up, driving mobile health clinics deep into the remote mountain villages, or conducting humble, door-to-door home visits to look these women in the eyes, evaluate their health, and tell them they matter," she writes.

Additionally, Matthew Moran was selected as the video essay winner. He is starting his first year at the University of Florida. In his video, he shares about how, upon moving to his hometown in Florida at the age of six, he became sick and was diagnosed with leukemia.

"Some cancers have a 50/50 chance of survival, and I understood this as a coin toss. This was scary to me, and I didn't know if my life was at stake," he said.