Faculty at the UCR SOM are often hesitant to pursue a promotion out of concern that they’re not ready. Fortunately, the SOM’s Office of Academic Affairs is there to guide them through the review process and any others they will encounter as faculty.

Wydette Morales, a senior academic affairs analyst in the UCR School of Medicine, and her team meet with most faculty members every few years for their academic review and frequently encourage them to seek a merit or a promotion if they’re eligible. “I tell them, ‘Let's just try and put your best foot forward,’” she said.

Morales works to translate every aspect of the faculty member’s role into an online system to help reviewers understand their full contributions to the school. “A lot of times the faculty will be like, ‘Well, it's just part of my job,’ and not really recognize that it's something that they could obtain credit for in their academic review,” Morales explained, whether it’s reviewing manuscripts, mentoring, participating in quality improvement projects, or establishing lab policies. “All of that is counted towards their review, but they don't see it as anything extra, and so I assist them in really honing in on what those activities are and how they can get credit for them.”

Morales said she’s happy when the faculty receive the promotion. “Seeing them go up for review and get it, that, to me, is really satisfying,” she said.

“You can call it Faculty Affairs”

Beyond helping over 100 faculty members through the review process each year, the Office of Academic Affairs takes care of everything else related to faculty.

“We handle the life cycle of the faculty,” explained Morales, from collaborating with search firms to working on faculty reappointments. In between, they answer candidates’ questions about employment applications, work with departments to create offer letters, compile new faculty members’ appointment files, connect faculty to and manage professional development opportunities, guide them through the review process for promotions, process reappointments, and more. With over 380 core faculty at the SOM and over 1300 community-based faculty working offsite in their own clinics, “it's ongoing all the time,” Morales said.

Morales joined the office in 2015 from UC San Diego. “UCR School of Medicine has provided me the opportunity to really be able to be part of creating something and making it bigger than myself,” she said. “We have such a great team, and… we’re constantly trying to partner with our faculty to figure out what their needs are to give them a better experience here at UCR.”

Director of Academic Affairs Margi Burnett has led the team since 2022, joining the office in 2019 after she graduated from UCR. In her role, she serves as the liaison between the office and the main campus, ensuring that the SOM follows UC and campus policies for academic appointments. Besides disseminating information to her unit, she also takes the lead on hiring for leadership positions such as associate deans.

While the team’s small size (compared to similar offices on campus) presents a challenge, Burnett said faculty appreciate the services they provide, particularly professional development workshops like the Stanford Faculty Development Series designed to build assistant professors’ teaching skill sets and the leadership workshop to prepare faculty for associate dean positions in the future.

Burnett encouraged faculty to make use of the office’s resources. “We're here for you,” she said. “We're here to help you grow as professionals, to support you in any way that you may need when it comes to your clinic work, your research work, to help expand your expertise and highlight you as a faculty member for your career development,” she added. “We should be the first office that faculty should be coming to to answer any kind of questions that they have in regards to their faculty appointment, and how we can help them advance.”

The team’s other leader, Iryna Ethell, PhD, associate dean of academic affairs and a professor of biomedical sciences, joined the unit in 2016 at the request of Deborah Deas, MD, MPH, the vice chancellor for health sciences and the Mark and Pam Rubin dean of the SOM. In her role, which she took on with the goal of making a positive difference for faculty members, Ethell helps review faculty applications by applying her knowledge of UC policies to match applicants’ experience to the appropriate appointment. She also meets one on one with current faculty members to help them understand their responsibilities and expectations and how to advance in their role, including sometimes pairing them with a faculty mentor to help them succeed.

Despite working as a faculty member at UCR since 2002, Ethell said she didn’t fully understand the office’s responsibilities before she started her role. “You can call it Faculty Affairs,” she summed up. “So everything related to faculty, faculty recruitment, faculty advancement, faculty development.”

Supporting the SOM’s mission

For Ethell, the office’s focus on faculty has broad implications. “Academic Affairs is in the center of it all, because our goal is to train physicians,” she said. Ethell pointed out that the office helps select and support faculty members who in turn teach medical students, giving the office a direct impact on the SOM’s mission to train a diverse physician workforce to serve the Inland Empire. “We have so many faculty committees making decisions on education and how the School of Medicine runs, and where it's going, so we feel like we're right in the center,” she added.

Other team members agreed. “We make an effort to ensure that we are hiring quality faculty because we're teaching future physicians, who are going to be our physicians,” said Morales. “Our health is going to be in these students’ hands in the future, so I want to ensure that they're getting the best.”

“I may not be seeing patients, but I'm ensuring that the faculty who are seeing patients and teaching our students are qualified to do so,” Morales continued. She doesn’t directly hire or participate in the faculty’s shared governance, in which faculty members review each others’ files and have a vote as part of the review process. Still, she said, “I get to be part of our mission in a way that's serving our community, even if it's in a different capacity.”

Ethell said she feels especially drawn to supporting the mission by helping recruit diverse faculty who will better connect with the SOM’s diverse student body. “We make sure that when students come here, they look at faculty members like, ‘Oh, they're like us, they understand us,’” said Ethell, who’s a first-generation college student from a medically underserved area herself. “And because we understand them, then we can help them better to succeed.”

Since Ethell joined the university more than 20 years ago, she’s seen an increase in women and overall diversity among the faculty. “I feel like I maybe contributed to that, and that makes me feel good,” she said.

Ethell has also seen former students return to teach at the SOM. “We want to recruit as many of our alumni as we can, especially if they're in the area,” she said. Ethell added that paid faculty positions aren’t the only option; local physicians can also become volunteer faculty or take part in the LACE Program to mentor students in their clinics. “They can get involved in many different ways, and then it's a nice feeling of community,” she said.

In the future, Ethell hopes the office can help provide similar review and advancement opportunities for staff that they currently offer to faculty. For now, though, she wants faculty members to know that the office is there to help.

“Some faculty feel that they're supposed to figure out everything on their own, and that’s a mistake,” Ethell said. She emphasized that there are no dumb questions, and the office is never too busy to help. “I think they should reach out to us more frequently, and sometimes, something that may take them months or even longer to figure out could be a simple phone call or email that can be solved in a matter of hours or less,” she said.

“Faculty affairs is something I'm really passionate about,” Ethell added. “I just love helping faculty.”