R'Excellence

R’Excellence: How Bold Hearts and Brilliant Minds are Made (UGRD 010) is a uniquely conceptualized course designed to be delivered to an in-person and online UCR student population (synchronously). The vision for this course is to introduce our students to UCR’s dynamic faculty, their areas of expertise and research, and to demonstrate that pursuing a degree at an R1 institution means to actively engage in a vibrant research community with world-class experts and cutting-edge research.

In part, the goals of the course are to:

Expose students across UCR to a notable and interdisciplinary group of UCR faculty members.
Provide opportunities for students to reflect upon their learning experiences in the course in order to explore what it means to become an expert.
Develop a community of engaged learners who recognize themselves as emerging student-scholars in a Research intensive university.

Dr. Loralee Larios

Assistant Professor and Plant Ecologist

Loralee Larios, Associate Professor of Plant Ecology in Botany and Plant Sciences, is a leader in the field of restoration and plant ecology. She earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California-Berkeley and has over 20 years of experience working in California’s ecosystems. Her research focuses on understanding how accelerated environmental change, habitat loss, and invasion by nonnative species threaten the biodiversity of our public lands, and she works collaboratively with practitioners to mitigate those threats by restoring native habitat. She is a first-generation Latina, who has a long-standing commitment to improving student success along the educational pipeline from K-12 education, undergraduate and graduate training to supporting faculty.

Dr. Lucy Delaney

Assistant Professor of Teaching, Dept. of EEOB

Dr. Lucy Delaney is an award-winning educator that was once, a long time ago, a very bad student. While she muddled through bachelor's and master's degrees from the City University of New York in Molecular Biology, she skipped class, crammed the night before, and never went to office hours. But something changed in the final semester of her master's program---Lucy finally experienced the transformative power of wholehearted teaching. Suddenly she was a very good student. In short, Lucy discovered why she cared. After completing a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, she arrived at UCR in 2022 with the dream of figuring out this "wholehearted teaching" thing for herself and helping others discover why they care. Her research focuses on the retention and success of students in the introductory biology sequence using a mixed-methods approach. Currently, she is funded through the Hellman Fellowship Program to produce That's Life, an educational television program designed to engage learners in novel ways and revive excitement in STEM.

Dr. Raquel M. Rall

Associate Professor Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives Co-Chair, UC Black Administrator's Council Chair, UC Online Advisory Council

Raquel M. Rall is an associate professor and associate dean of strategic initiatives in the School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. Before her appointment at UCR, she was a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Research Professor at the University of Southern California (USC). She has a Ph.D. in education policy from USC and degrees in Human Biology and African and African American Studies from Stanford. Her research centers postsecondary leadership and governance. Rall is a national expert on higher education governance whose work on decision-making and equity is advancing higher education in novel ways. Rall is the co-founder and co-director of the Center for Strategic & Inclusive Governance which is co-housed at UCR and the University of Michigan.

Dr. Rich Yueh

Assistant Professor of Teaching in Information Systems

Dr. Rich Yueh is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Information Systems in the School of Business. His work explores how technology, creativity, and design can make learning more meaningful in an AI-augmented world. He blends technical fluency with human-centered teaching, creating courses and programs that empower students to think critically and act creatively. His teaching has been recognized with multiple student- and faculty-nominated honors, including the Shulman Endowed Excellence in Teaching Award, the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Innovative Teaching Award, and several Golden Apple Teaching Awards.

Dr. Richard Carpiano

Professor of Public Policy

Dr. Richard M. Carpiano is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside, where he is also the Faculty Director of the Science to Policy (S2P) Program. Trained as a public and population health scientist and medical sociologist, Dr. Carpiano studies how social factors, such as education, income, race-ethnicity, social connections, and community conditions, contribute to the health of adults and children. A substantial focus of his research concerns social, behavioral, attitude, and policy factors underlying vaccination uptake and coverage (and refusal or delay). As part of this work, Dr. Carpiano served as a member of The Lancet medical journal’s Commission on Vaccine Refusal, Acceptance, and Demand in the United States.

More recently, Dr. Carpiano’s research- and policy-related activities have also centered on pandemic preparedness and response. Presently, he co-chairs the Lancet Commission on US Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age: Lessons for the Present from the Future, which is focused on improving pandemic preparedness through fostering community resilience. From 2021-23, he was a member of the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST)’s COVID-19 Task Force, which aimed to link science and technology expertise to state policy-makers regarding how California can be more resilient to public health threats.

Beyond his research, policy, teaching, and mentoring activities, Dr. Carpiano engages extensively with news media on a wide range of public health and sociological topics. During the pandemic, he provided commentary on a variety of issues related to COVID-19. He is a former co-editor (with Brian Kelly of Indiana University) of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, an academic research journal published by the American Sociological Association.

Dr. Carpiano received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Sociomedical Sciences (with concentration in Sociology) from Columbia University, his M.P.H. from Case Western Reserve University, and M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from Baylor University. From 2004-2006, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Xóchitl C. Chávez

Associate Professor, Department of Music

The first tenured Chicana in any UC music program. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz with interdisciplinary training in Museum Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore.
As an activist scholar, musician, and dancer, Dr. Chávez researches collaborative practices while documenting the ways Mexican Indigenous migrants and Latinos maintain cultural traditions across borders. Her forthcoming book, La Guelaguetza: Oaxacan Migrant Festivals and the Making of Transborder Indigeneity (Oxford, 2025), represents the first transborder ethnography of its kind, based on eight years of fieldwork.
Dr. Chávez has secured NEH funding as co-investigator for "Soundscapes of the People" and received recognition from the Smithsonian and Mexican Consulate. She serves as President of the Latin American and Caribbean Section for the Society for Ethnomusicology and is a founding member of Armonía, which advances Latino music education. She currently serves as a curatorial researcher for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino and is a member of the National Advisory Board with The Cheech Museum.

Division of Undergraduate Education