sdsu excel Awards
ExCEL 2026 Award Nomination Form
ANNUAL TIMELINE
- August-September: Revise annual process, forms, documents, etc.
- October 15: Call for nominations via Salesforce and State Up-to-Date
- October 15-December 1: Nomination period.
- January-February: ExCEL Review Committee selects winner(s), notifications sent to all nominees, State Up-to-Date winner and luncheon announcement.
- March: Preparation for award luncheon.
- April: ExCEL Award luncheon.
OVERVIEW
The SDSU Excellence in Community Engaged Learning (ExCEL) Award recognizes outstanding faculty and community partner contributions to community engaged teaching and learning. For the purposes of this award, community engaged teaching/learning may be contextualized in ways consistent with the definitions as published in the SDSU Curriculum Guide. Examples include:
- Community Engaged (CE) courses
- Service Learning (SL) courses
- Innovative clinical and field placement programs offered for academic credit.
- Local, regional or international community engaged research or projects that, while not tied to a specific course, allow for or support students to co-enroll in a General Studies or department-level course that offers academic credit for the students’ community engaged work.
The following are criteria for review. Successful nominations will communicate effectively the project's capacity to:
- Develop and maintain a reciprocal/mutually beneficial relationship with the community partner(s).
- Engage students and learning in meaningful ways.
- Have a positive impact on the SDSU campus and local, regional, and/or international communities.
- Demonstrate depth, pervasiveness and innovation.
2026 AWARD CYCLE
Nomination Period
October 15 to December 1, 2025
Winner Announced
February 2026
Award Amount
$5,000
Number of Awards
A minimum of one award winner will be selected. Honorable mentions or runner’s up may be selected, and may receive a nominal financial award.
Allocation of Funds
Fund transfer will occur between July 1 and August 15, 2026.
Fund Use
Funds may be used to support any aspect of their community-based work as long as it complies with rules relating to the use of State of CA Funds. Funds must be used by the end of the 2026-2027 academic year. Examples of how funds can be used include, but are not limited to:
- Fund a student assistant or otherwise compensate student work
- Supplies
- Equipment
- Transportation
- Hospitality
- Outside speaker
The funds may not be used to buy out faculty time, or to pay for employee positions.
Who May Nominate?
- Self-nominations by SDSU faculty/staff are highly encouraged.
- Deans, Department Chairs, School Directors and other administrators may also nominate and/or encourage faculty/staff for this award.
- Courses/projects of all scope and size are encouraged to apply.
How to Nominate?
Nominators must complete the ExCEL Award Nomination Form. A nomination letter alone is not sufficient. In the nomination form, nominators are required to:
- Identify one faculty/staff member to serve as the contact person/nominee for the nomination.
- Identify the community partner organization, as well as a contact person (with valid email) from that organization. Nominated projects with more than one community partner will list all community partners, and identify one specific community partner as the "contact" community partner.
- Provide detailed information about the project purpose, impact, funding, related research, and more.
- Letters of support: Academic Deans, Department Chairs, School Directors,College Honors & Awards Committees and other administrators may submit a letter of support on behalf of a nominated course/project. (optional)
- Photograph/caption: one (1) photo that is representative of the community engaged work, along with an appropriate caption. (optional)
What Is required of the SDSU ExCEL Award winner(s)?
- The contact person/nominee must be willing to give a talk about their community engaged work, and community engagement in general, at the annual SDSU ExCEL Award event in April of the same academic year they are nominated. The contact person/nominee is encouraged to include other project contributors, including community partners and affiliated students, in that presentation.
- Community partners identified in the nomination form should be willing to complete a brief survey.
- The contact person/nominee must identify a department/college level budget coordinator/analyst/manager who can: a) provide an Oracle account string where the award funds can be transferred, and b) support the management of the funds to support the awardee(s) community engaged work.
EXCEL Winners
2026 Winners: Dr. Lianne Urada & Ms. Carina Voly
This year’s recipients are Dr. Lianne Urada, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work (Homelessness: Social Work Solutions), and Ms. Carina Voly, Director, SDSU Community Music School.
Lianne A. Urada, PhD, MSW, LCSW, is an Associate Professor of Social Work at San Diego State University. Her research centers on creating innovative ways to address homelessness and human trafficking. She most recently led an NIH-funded pilot study (“Bupe by the Book”) with the San Diego Public Libraries and Father Joe’s Villages’ Village Health Center. This project helped connect unstably housed people to treatment for opioid use disorder using telehealth at libraries. Women's Empowerment International now supports her research in helping unhoused women in San Diego gain economic independence. Through her research and teaching, she aims to improve community safety for unsheltered women and others vulnerable to exploitation. This year, she taught the first Homelessness: Social Work Solutions course at SDSU. In her current Community Organizing and Problem-Solving class, students partner with Father Joe’s Villages, the San Diego County Office of Homeless Solutions, PATH, and the SDSU Basic Needs Center to find collaborative solutions to homelessness.
Ms. Carina Voly is the Director and cello faculty for the SDSU Community Music School. Ms. Voly’s trajectory in the music education field includes directorships at the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras as Director of Chamber Music, the Prelude Music Academy, New World Symphony and San Diego Youth Symphony. In addition to these roles, she has maintained a large private cello studio; her students have continued their education at universities and conservatories such as Eastman, Longy and Lawrence, among others. Her philosophy, influenced by teachers and mentors like Uri Vardi, Janet Jensen, Shmuel Magen and Mimi Zweig, includes teaching high standards, using positive reinforcement, building of a non-judgmental environment, all with a total dedication to the belief that music should be an integral part of any child’s education and upbringing regardless of socio-economic background. Ms. Voly has performed everything from chamber and orchestral to folk and world music with orchestras and chamber groups around the world. She started her cello studies in her native Buenos Aires (Argentina), and holds degrees in cello performance and pedagogy from the Jerusalem Rubin Academy in Israel, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. www.carinavoly.com
In addition, the committee identified several runners up, listed here in no particular order:
- Dr. David Cline, College of Arts & Letters
- Dr. Erlinde Cornelis, College of Business
- Dr. Vanessa Falcón Orta & Weichen Zhao, SDSU Imperial Valley
- Dr. Sara Gombatto, College of Health and Human Services
The award winner and runners up will be honored on Thursday, April 16,2026 - 12:00-1:30pm. Please RSVP here to join us in celebrating their many contributions to the SDSU community!
2025 Inaugural Winner: Dr. Megan Welsh Carroll
Project Sanitation Justice (PSJ) is an ecosystem of community partnerships led by Dr. Megan Welsh Carroll (pictured above), Associate Professor of Public Affairs in the College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts. The ecosystem of community partners includes Think Dignity, Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, San Diego River Park Foundation, Lived Experience Advisers, San Diego Metropolitan Transit System, People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) San Diego, California Department of Public Health, American Restroom Association, Mid-City CAN, San Diego Public Library - Mission Valley branch, SDSU University Police Department, and SDSU Counseling & Psychological Services, with more added annually.
PSJ partners with individuals and organizations locally and nationally to advance sanitation rights through action research and policy advocacy. In its first 4 years of existence, PSJ has partnered with a wide range of local and national non-profit organizations and public service providers to document, amplify, and advocate these partners’ work and needs around water, sanitation, and hygiene access. PSJ meets community partners where they’re at in terms of reciprocity and collective action. PSJ works tirelessly to conduct community driven action research. PSJ accomplishes this through our robust social network of direct service providers and advocates who work in this space; listening to these collaborators, our team designs and carries out action research to document community needs, offer academic legitimacy where necessary, and provide data, maps, and other ways to visualize community needs.
The nominations for this inauguaral award were all of extremely high quality. This year's runners up include the following faculty, in no particular order:
- Dr. Samantha Bova, College of Sciences
- Dr. Laura Coco, College of Health and Human Services
- Dr. Ana Dueñas, College of Education
- Dr. Jeffery Osborne, Division of Professional Studies (Imperial Valley)
- Dr. Jessica Barlow, College of Arts and Letters
- Dr. Roberto Hernández, College of Arts and Letters
- Dr. Randall Timm, College of Education, SACD