Marcela Cuellar Named 2022-23 Chancellor’s Fellow
School of Education Associate Professor Marcela Cuellar has been named a UC Davis 2022-23 Chancellor’s Fellow, an honor given each year to a handful of associate professors or newly promoted full professors to support their groundbreaking scholarly work and service to the university as dedicated teachers and campus citizens. She will retain the title for five years.
“Our newest fellows represent the very best of UC Davis and I congratulate them,” Chancellor Gary S. May said in announcing the new fellows. “The knowledge, expertise and excellence these faculty demonstrate across a range of disciplines positively impacts our university’s mission of research, teaching and public service.”
Each fellow receives $25,000 in unrestricted funds for their research or other scholarly work. UC Davis has named 191 faculty members as Chancellor’s Fellows over the program’s 23-year history, with philanthropic support from the UC Davis Annual Fund, Davis Chancellor’s Club and the UC Davis Parents Fund.
Cuellar has established herself as a preeminent scholar of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, or HSIs, and her research into access and equity in higher education, HSIs and Latinx student success is offering new conceptualizations regarding the educational landscape for Latinx students and other marginalized groups. Her impactful work directly informs policy and practice, as evidenced by the multiple ways in which her expertise has been tapped by HSI initiatives at UC Davis and throughout the University of California.
Cuellar is the ninth School of Education faculty member to be named a Chancellor’s Fellow in the last ten years. She joins professors Danny C. Martinez (2021), Kevin Gee (2020), Megan Welsh (2019), Lee Martin (2017), Emily Solari (2016), Tobin White (2015), Heidi Ballard (2014) and Michal Kurlaender (2013), making the School of Education among the most awarded departments in the 23-year history of the Chancellor’s Fellows Program.
Cuellar’s recent research includes:
- García, G.A., & Cuellar, M.G. (2023). Advancing Intersectionality in Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs): Individual, organizational, and political complexities of serving Latinx/e students. AERA Open.
- Arellano, L., Cuellar, M.G.., Gonzalez, A.M. (2022). Accountable to whom? Reimagining Hispanic Serving Institutions’ financial models. New Directions in Higher Education.
- Cuellar, M.G., Bencomo Garcia, A.*, & Saichaie, K. (2022). Reaffirming the public purposes of higher education: First-generation and continuing generation students’ perspectives. Journal of Higher Education, 93(2), 273-296.
- Deeb-Sossa, N., Cuellar, M.G., Nuñez Martinez, M.*, Nava, Y.*, & Guerrero, B.G. (2021). Examining recruitment practices for servingness during COVID-19: Perspectives from institutional agents at an emerging Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Education Sciences, 11(9), 454.
