Lucy Delaney, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the UC Riverside Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology (EEOB), focuses her work at the UC Riverside College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) on improving the teaching and learning of biological sciences, with an added emphasis on understanding evolutionary theory.

Professor Delaney’s own career evolutions have included working as a waitress at Bar Boulud on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and a stint as a forensic scientist in New York City after earning a master’s degree in forensic molecular biology from John College of Criminal Justice.

“I think I’ve spent a lot of my life with an idea of the person I would like to be,” she says, “and I don’t know that that always matched with the person that I actually am. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with myself to be honest with what it was that I really liked and wanted to do.

“For a very long time, a large part of my identity was ego-driven about how I was perceived,” she admits. “When I went for my Ph.D., I was aiming to prove something to other people about how smart I was. I had delusions of grandeur about how I was going to be the Michael Jordan of evolutionary biology. Maybe I’d win the Nobel Prize… which is hilarious because no evolutionary biologist, not even Darwin himself, has ever won it! That was where my head was at…I thought I was very clever and smart and I was going to prove it.”

By her own admission, Professor Delaney has come a long way. “I was not interested in math or science for a long time,” she says. “I didn’t particularly enjoy hard work, and math and science didn’t come easily to me. I thought that I’d become a writer. I ended up getting a scholarship to Pratt Institute in New York City, where I planned to get a BFA in poetry.”

A turning point came when Professor Delaney attended classes at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) after she had moved back to the Midwest from New York City. “My whole life in biology up until then was memorizing and regurgitating facts, which I did faithfully,” she says. “Nobody ever gave me a conceptual framework that connected those facts in any kind of meaningful way…nobody taught me how to take a top-down approach to biology and look at it as a whole. The classes I took at UIC were where I met biologists who were interested in the ‘why?’”

In December 2021, Professor Delaney came to UC Riverside, where she’s made a big impression on her students. She teaches 400-900 students a quarter, principally in BIOL 005B and BIOL 002. Professor Delaney says that all her scholarly activity and research are focused on the introductory biology classes she teaches, classes known as “the 5 series.”

“I personally think that first year of introductory biology is the most important place to catch, educate and retain students for the biology major,” she says.

When it comes to teaching, Professor Delaney relies on techniques she learned in theater to keep students interested. “I need their attention for 45 minutes…that is not possible to do at a lecture where all you do is read slides,” she explains. “Students don’t enjoy that and become bored. I’m lucky in that I was blessed with an ability to perform, which not everyone has. I’ve always been a bit of a ham…I always joke that I’m out there with ‘jazz hands!’

Her penchant for performing lends itself well to the introductory track of her classes. “I’m out there giving a monologue like a one-woman show,” she says. “I used to joke that I did six shows a week, because I typically teach two classes that meet three times a week.”

A “reformed know-it-all,” Professor Delaney loves breaking down biology lessons and then watching her students the moment it clicks and they understand the concepts. “The act is so rewarding to me,” she says. “It’s the crux of what I do…explain things to people. That’s the goal isn’t it? Finding the thing that makes you want to get up in the morning and excites you about your experience on planet Earth. That’s the best thing I can try to give my students.

Professor Delaney continues, “The one concept I always try to end with in my courses is telling them you can’t plant carrots and get cucumbers, but if you plant love, all you can receive is love. To me it’s part of the fundamental law of the universe. You reap what you sow is another way of saying it. It’s so easy for us to get caught up in our own ego gratification that we lose touch with connecting with one another.”

Professor Delaney appreciates that her, as she puts it, “particular brand of weirdness” has been embraced at UC Riverside. “I submitted a packet of materials when I applied for my position at UC Riverside that was really wild and unusual, “she says. “I had fun with it and was just being myself.”

According to Professor Delaney, it doesn’t get better than teaching at UC Riverside. “I always envisioned myself at a public institution that was similar to the ones I went to. I saw that at UC Riverside right away…I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world,” she says. “It’s very similar to the institutions I came up in, public institutions that serve a population of students that have historically been underserved.”

Professor Delaney adds, “In my experience, being educated in those institutions changed my whole life.” 

Ask a CNAS Prof: Lucy Delaney