Richard Yao, Ph.D.
President, California State University Channel Islands
Dr. Richard Yao has served as President of California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI) since January 2021, first in an interim role after having served as Vice President for Student Affairs since June 2018, and then in his permanent capacity after a nationwide search and the CSU Board of Trustees’ appointment in January 2022.
President Yao earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Fielding Graduate University, an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Eastern Illinois University, and a B.A. in Psychology from Eastern Illinois University. Prior to joining CSUCI, he resided in Las Vegas, Nevada for 23 years, where he was an active member of the higher education and mental health communities. Early in his clinical career, he worked with individuals with chronic and persistent mental illness as well as with transition-aged youth from the foster care system. Yao then focused primarily on forensic psychological assessments, with an emphasis on juvenile certification evaluations for the Juvenile Court and Public Defender’s Office, parental capacity evaluations for the Department of Family Services, and psychological disability evaluations for the Bureau of Disability Adjudication. Throughout this time, he also served as a full-time Psychology Lecturer with Nevada State College, which like CSUCI, opened its doors in 2002. He was eventually tasked with building out their Student Affairs programming and first served as the Director of Student Development before becoming their founding Dean of Students.
Since coming to CSUCI, President Yao has distinguished himself as a campus leader who is steady the face of challenges—including those that are life-threatening, such as the campus evacuations and wildfires he helped the University to navigate in his first semester; a mass shooting at a nearby club that same semester; and the global pandemic. Dr. Yao’s deep background in managing trauma and promoting mental health as well as his engaged and authentic presence have served the students and employees of the campus well in extraordinarily difficult times.
While serving as the Vice President for Student Affairs, President Yao increased collaborations between Academic and Student Affairs programs to improve student success and worked to ensure that co-curricular programming was in full alignment with the academic mission of the University. He worked to demonstrate the relationship between students’ utilization of support services and academic success markers, and in collaboration with the Chancellor’s Office, helped lead a system-wide pilot program to develop a Student Affairs data dashboard and examine student demographics in relation to utilization of support services.
As the educational, fiscal, and community leader now responsible for the youngest of the CSUs in its third decade of being, President Yao has been assertive from the start in establishing and enacting his priorities for the campus. Under his leadership and through his personal commitment of “honoring our past, building the future,” CSUCI has: recentralized the role and impact of Institutional Research as a critical partner for Enrollment Management, divisional leadership, individual researchers (faculty, staff, and student), and the Office of the President; created and implemented the University’s first Inclusive Excellence Action Plan, with responsibility institutionally owned for the first time in campus history for actively advancing the values of diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility; undertook a multi-year, cross-divisional study of CSUCI students’ post-graduation outcomes, seeking to understand and improve them through an examination of high impact practices as potential predictors of improved salary earnings post-graduation; launched a three-phased Integrated Marketing Communication Plan, utilizing market research as the foundation of an emerging brand foundation; facilitated an unprecedented level of philanthropic support for CI with several highly impactful, multi-million dollar gifts received since 2021; received Board of Trustee approval for an aggressive Academic Master Plan that will bring new undergraduate and graduate programs into being over the coming decade, prioritizing regional industry needs and utilizing the campus’s first data-based, cost-model methodology for evaluating and prioritizing new and existing programs; actively partnered with the local Indigenous community to ensure strong tribal-campus relations and respectful cultural engagement through the creation of a President’s Chumash Advisory Council; and engaged the campus community in a President’s Operational Effectiveness Challenge, inviting faculty, staff, and administrators to form teams to study operational challenges, using Bolman & Deal’s Four-Frame analytical framework for understanding where “sand in the gears” is impeding effectiveness, and to identify actions for improvement.
Dr. Yao’s presidency is guided by his commitment to transparency, authentic engagement, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility – all in service to CSUCI’s academic mission of placing students at the center of the educational experience and impactfully serving regional needs.