Riley McIsaac

Riley McIsaac serves as the Director of Grants Development in the Office of Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Initiatives at The University of Arizona (UArizona). As a federally designated HSI, UArizona is eligible to apply to a variety of competitive grant opportunities. Riley’s role on campus is to lead and implement grant development activities throughout UArizona that support internal and external HSI capacity building efforts. Riley is passionate about seeing UArizona thrive as a forward thinking HSI and a leader in the R1 HSI space.

Riley has worked in higher education for over 10 years, serving in various administrative capacities including grants administration, project and program management, and research lab management. For five years, Riley served as the UArizona Program Manager of an NSF funded Scholarship-for-Service program for graduate students. In this capacity, Riley worked to diversify the scholarship recipients by targeted outreach and thoughtful relationship building throughout the UArizona community and beyond.

Prior to her tenure at UArizona, Riley worked in refugee resettlement and foreign exchange.  She holds her B.A. from McGill University, where she double majored in Sociocultural Anthropology and English Literature, and an M.A. from UArizona in Latin American Studies, focusing on U.S. - Mexico border issues and immigration. She has lived in Ecuador and Peru and is fluent in the Spanish language.