Outstanding Faculty Innovator in Student Success
Kelly Ansley Young, Ph.D.
California State University, Long Beach
Professor, Biological Sciences
Working at CSULB has encouraged me to grow, to become an advocate, and to devote myself to facilitating the success of our students and faculty members. Each day on campus brings new opportunities to simultaneously learn from and cheer on the incredible individuals of our CSU community. ”
Strong teaching and effective student mentoring—critical elements to students’ success–begin and end with knowledgeable and committed faculty members who share their expertise with one another. Dr. Kelly Ansley Young is exemplary in this regard. For the 20 years she has been at Cal State Long Beach, she has utilized her exceptional teaching skills, knowledge, focused scholarship and student-centered inclusive approach to create faculty pedagogical and mentoring programs that promote student achievement.
Hired in 2003 in the Department of Biological Sciences, Young committed early on to make her classroom and research laboratory student-centered. While she was recognized for her effective and innovative teaching and mentoring, Young strove for student success beyond students she worked with directly by creating learning communities for colleagues.
As part of the NIH Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) program at Cal State Long Beach, Young created two programs to train mentors of research students, her most recent program focusing on mentoring through an equity and inclusivity lens. Since the summer of 2022, over 600 mentors have completed the Advanced Inclusive Mentoring (AIM) program and Young has trained AIM leaders at 11 CSU campuses, with nine of these universities adopting AIM. All told, AIM mentors are projected to reach an estimated 42,000 to 140,000 students during their careers.
In CSULB’s College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, where she is currently the director of faculty retention, Young also developed faculty learning communities and the college’s mentoring program. Moreover, in her yearlong appointment as faculty director of the Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program for the CSU, she enacted key transformations to better serve CSU students earning their doctorates and planning to return to the CSU as faculty.
Young’s reproductive biology research laboratory is revered as a place where her students are not merely observers; they do their own research, present it at conferences and publish it in scholarly journals. Young successfully funded student research through three National Institute of Health grants. Overall, Young’s practices and programs have multiplied exponentially the success of CSU students.
Young holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, a master’s degree in psychology from Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.