Published October 14, 2025
By Darlene Muguiro
UTEP College of Health Sciences

In early October, the Department of Social Work was recognized by UTEP administration for having reached a significant milestone in scholarly activity. At the President’s Honors Dinner, hosted by UTEP Research and Innovation, the Department was commended for their research success. At a total of $3,056,730, the Department was named first at UTEP in obligated grant funding for the 2025 fiscal year, normalized by the number of tenured/tenure-track faculty. Additionally, each of the department’s five tenured/tenure-track faculty received grants during the same time period.

Dr. Emre Umucu, Associate Dean for Research at CHS, accompanied faculty and Department of Social Work Chair Dr. Eva Moya during the recognition ceremony. He mentioned that the extraordinary achievement was a reflection of the Department’s strong collaboration with the community it serves and the faculty’s unwavering commitment to advancing well-being.

“The Department of Social Work stands as a shining example of what can be accomplished through teamwork and shared vision,” he said. “Their accomplishments remind us of the impact we can have when we work together to push the boundaries of research and innovation.”

Dr. Moya explained that faculty have a wide breadth of projects targeting multiple stakeholders – graduates, professionals, community members – which are funded both privately and via multi-year federal grants. Included among the Department’s federally funded projects are an initiative that provides stipends for child welfare workers to seek their MSW degrees; mental health provision and awareness training programs; an initiative aimed at building mental health resilience among migrant and refugee communities; a violence prevention program; an initiative focused on improving glycemic control and metabolic health among Hispanics; bilingual geriatric education and training; and two NIH projects - one looking at evidence-based interventions for walking engagement and the second investigating how to increase metabolic research capacity at UTEP.

Among the Department’s privately funded grants are a project documenting the work of Familias Triunfadoras in the underserved community of San Elizario, Texas; a training program that prepares recent MSW graduates for the LCSW certification; a food security grant that documents food insecurity on the UTEP campus; and HOPE+, an initiative providing outreach, screenings and referrals for vulnerable citizens in underserved communities in El Paso.

Moya said that the announcement initially came as a bit of a shock, considering that in the past, the type of announcements that came out regarding research productivity were for entire colleges.

“The Department of Social Work is on the rise, and the research that we are doing is interdisciplinary in nature and highly community-engaged. It impacts communities directly and has great potential for scholarship of publications as well as to inform future program development and policy, and clinical practice.”   

Moya hopes that the announcement will help lift the visibility of faculty scholarship in the College of Health Sciences.

“I’m hopeful that people will see that we, as health professionals, are making a true difference,” she said. “We are in the community, but at the same time, we have strong research contributions.”

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