The Research Ethics Education Program at the University of California, Riverside is a campus-wide resource for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty across all areas of research and scholarship.

We encourage proactive approaches to research integrity and professional conduct through collaborative engagement in training and education efforts.  We want to reinforce the idea that learning is a process that takes place through participation in communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1990), and the Research Ethics Education Program provides support and resources to those communities in efforts to sustain such situated learning.  

We affirm the sense that relationships between knowledge/practice and learning/doing are essential to ethical research and scholarship.  In this, we believe that the most meaningful education for our students comes from an engaged and equal collaboration between the ethical and the scientific and scholarly. 

Our goal is to ensure that research and scholarship ethics education is more fully and seamlessly integrated into the disciplinary communities of practice of which we and our students are a part and our broader mission is to cultivate a campus culture that recognizes the importance of ethical practice across all domains in the academy.

This site will provide you with information about available RCR education and training opportunities and resources on campus, as well as links to relevant federal and institutional policies. You will also find various training and mentoring materials here. The courses and seminars offered by the program are options for for partial fulfillment of federal funding requirements [NIH, NSF, and NIFA/USDA] for training in the responsible conduct of research (RCR).

Contact the Director

Dena Plemmons, Ph.D. | Director, Research Ethics Education Program   
Associate Professor (adj) | The Graduate Division  |  University of California, Riverside 
900 University Ave Riverside, CA 92521 | University Office Building RM 133 
Phone: 951-827-4312 | Email: dena.plemmons@ucr.edu 

Dena Plemmons is founding Director of the Research Ethics Education Program at the University of California, Riverside. The focus of her work has concerned such issues as ethics communication and education, differences among disciplinary scientific standards, ethics controversies, research-practice partnerships, and human subjects research, among other topics. She has consistently been funded, as PI and Co-PI, through NIH, NSF, and ORI for her research, which includes curriculum development in research ethics and leadership, and investigations into both common and best practices in areas of scientific practice both nationally and internationally. She is an elected AAAS Fellow, Editor-in-Chief of the Springer-Nature peer reviewed journal Science and Engineering Ethics, Chair-elect of the Board of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, and expert consultant with the National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.

*If you are interested in the specific regulations, requirements, policies and processes regarding submission and approval of protocols for IRB, IACUC, IBC, DURC and SCRO, or if you need to submit a financial conflict of interest disclosure form, please contact the UCR Office of Research Integrity.