The University of New Mexico recently announced the promotion and honor of 10 faculty to the rank of Distinguished Professor. They include Lisa Broidy, Alexander Buium, Joseph Cook, Laura Crossey, Jeremy Edwards, Fernando Garzon, Kerry Howe, Mary Ann Osley, Nina Wallerstein and Douglas Ziedonis.
The rank of Distinguished Professor is the highest title that UNM bestows upon its faculty. It is awarded to those individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievements, and are nationally and internationally renowned as scholars.
College of Arts and Sciences
Lisa Broidy
Broidy’s research focuses on how gender frames the structural, individual, and situational processes associated with violence and antisocial behavior. Building primarily from General Strain Theory and Developmental & Life Course Theories, her work contributes to the growing theoretical and empirical literature that account for gender differences in criminal involvement while also recognizing the significant heterogeneity that characterizes women’s pathways into and out of crime.
She examines the relationship between gender and crime in both contemporary and historical contexts in the U.S. and cross-nationally. In investigating why women offend at much lower rates than men, her work suggests that the structural and social contexts women navigate limit their opportunities and motivations for serious offending. At the same time, her work illustrates that throughout the life course, girls and women confront a range of challenges that, for some, do prove criminogenic and can have both short and long-term consequences for their offending trajectories. Her work also examines the implications of these gendered processes for criminal justice policy and practice, particularly around female incarceration and domestic violence.
Alexandru Buium
Buium was born in 1955, in Bucharest, Romania. He holds an M.S. from the University of Bucharest, Romania (1980) and a Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest, Romania (1983). From 1990 to 1995, he was a senior researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. From 1995 to 1997, he was an associate professor at UNM. He has been a professor of mathematics at The University of New Mexico since 1997. He was awarded the Titeica Prize of the Romanian Academy of Science (1987), a Humboldt Fellow (1992/93), a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1993/94) and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (class of 2016).
His visiting positions include at Columbia University (NYC), University of Paris 7 (Paris), Max Planck Institute (Bonn), Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (Bures, France).
Buium’s research areas include algebra, number theory and geometry. He has written several publications (6 research monographs and over 80 research papers) including the 2013 textbook Mathematics: a Minimal Introduction, and the research monographs Differential Function Fields and Moduli of Algebraic Varieties, Lecture Notes in Math (1986), Differential Algebraic Groups of Finite Dimension, Lecture Notes in Math (1992), and Differential Algebra and Diophantine Geometry (1994).
Joseph Cook
After dropping out of high school in Silver City, Cook received his GED, and later B.S. in Biology at Western New Mexico University (1980), and M.S. (1982), and Ph.D. in Biology (1990) at UNM. He then moved to the University of Alaska and was promoted to Professor of Biology, Chief Curator, and Curator of Mammals and Cryogenic Collections at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. He later served as Professor (1990-2000) and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University (2000-2003). Subsequently, he returned to New Mexico as Professor of Biology and Curator of Mammals of the Museum of Southwestern Biology, where he also served as Director (2011-2017) and Curator of Genomic Resources (2007-2017). He was named Regents’ Professor in 2018.
Over the past two decades, he and his staff and students have built the UNM museum into the second largest collection of mammals worldwide, recently surpassing the British Museum in London. Critical biodiversity infrastructure, this resource is now the basis for >100 publications annually and is used widely in efforts to study emerging zoonotic pathogens, wildlife conservation, environmental pollutants, climate change, and the biological diversity of our planet. Cook has chaired national conservation committees (American Society of Mammalogists); led multiple international consortia and communities of practice (e.g., AIM-UP! Research Coordinating Network, Project Echo’s Museums and Emerging Pathogens in the Americas); was President of a national museum association (Natural Science Collections Alliance), and served on the National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed U.S. bio-collection infrastructure.
Laura Crossey
Crossey works with aqueous and sedimentary geochemistry, and applications of low-temperature geochemistry to problems in hydrochemistry, diagenesis, geomicrobiology and geothermal processes. Her research approach combines field examination of modern environments (biogeochemistry of water and sediments) with laboratory analysis as well as core and outcrop evaluations applied to evaluate paleohydrology, spring sustainability and reservoir/aquifer characteristics.
She is an MSL Expert Consultant for the ChemCam Team, Mars Science Laboratory Rover. Other activities include geoscience outreach, K-12 outreach, and science education research as well as programs to increase the participation of under-represented groups in the science disciplines. She is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Geological Society of America (GSA) and served as the Birdsall Dreiss Distinguished Lecturer for 2019 (sponsored by the Hydrogeology Division of GSA).
Jeremy Edwards
Edwards has worked at the interface of biology, bioinformatics, and engineering since the beginning of his scientific career. His graduate advisor was Dr. Bernhard Palsson, where he was the first person to take genome sequence information and develop predictive mathematical models of bacterial metabolism. His research started a significant global effort and many papers from his graduate work have over 800 citations. His graduate work sparked an intense interest in genomics technology and thus he worked with Dr. George Church at Harvard Medical School for his post-doctoral studies. He has worked on the development of genome technologies since that time.
Now, his laboratory is in the NCI designated Cancer Research and Treatment Center at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. He has a very active group of engineers, biologists, and chemists, all working together toward the development of ultrahigh-throughput DNA sequencing technology and computational biology.
UNM School of Engineering
Fernando Garzon joined UNM in 2014 as a jointly-appointed faculty member with Sandia National Laboratories, coming from Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is currently the director of the Center for Microengineered Materials and is an Academic Alliance Professor and continues to conduct joint research with Sandia.
His research interests include low-environmental impact electro-synthesis of fuels, the development of advanced gas sensors, fuel-cell materials technology, upgrading of light hydrocarbons, advanced manufacturing of ceramic materials technology, solid-state ionic devices for reconfigurable electronics, and sensors with ultralow detection limits for uranium and arsenic groundwater contamination.
Garzon is a fellow and past president of the Electrochemical Society and received the Department of Energy Fuel Cell Program Research Award in 2009. He is also the winner of Scientific American’s Top 50 Science and Technology Achievements for 2003 award and received the LANL Fellows Prize for Research Leadership.
Kerry Howe has been the director of the Center for Water and the Environment since 2013, where he leads the $5 million National Science Foundation-sponsored Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) Center for Water and the Environment project.
First funded in 2014, it was renewed for another $5 million over five years in 2020. Phase 1 of the CREST project focused on generating new knowledge about watersheds, treatment technologies for contaminated water, and interactions between water and energy production. Phase 2 is building on previous successes while expanding and redirecting the water-related research with new research questions, new partnerships with institutions, and a new emphasis on recruiting and retaining Native American students, a population that may be under-represented even among CREST centers.
Howe joined UNM in 2002 and is the recipient of awards including the Harrison Faculty Recognition Award, Stamm Outstanding Faculty Award and Regents’ Lecturer.
UNM Health Sciences Center
Mary Ann Osley is a professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology in the School of Medicine. She studies the processes that regulate the replication, transcription and repair DNA in chromosomes. Her work, which focuses on the role of histone proteins and chromatin in the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has important implications in the context of cancer genomics.
Her more recent work on cellular quiescence has important implications for how stem cells prevent aberrant proliferation as occurs in cancer cells. She has 63 peer-reviewed publications and has published in high-impact journals including Nature, Nature Cell Biology, Journal of Cell Biology, Molecular Cell Biology and Nucleic Acids Research.
She has received multiple grants from NIH including 3 R01 grants for her own research, and currently holds an NIH grant for her project “Functional Analysis of Quiescence.
Nina Wallerstein is a professor of Public Health in the College of Population Health. She studies interventions in communities to promote improved health (health education, health promotion), alcohol prevention as well as other risky behaviors with an emphasis on adolescents, and methodologies for community-based participatory research.
Her work emphasizes empowerment-based, culture-centered interventions that have proven highly effective. Much of her work has engaged with the Jemez Pueblo, the Navajo Nation, and the Mescalero Apache community. Wallerstein has also worked internationally, especially in Brazil where she has formed sustained collaborations and promoted the adoption of community-based participatory research approaches throughout Brazil.
She has published more than 170 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, 7 authored, co-authored, or edited books including Community-Based Research for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity, which is viewed as a field-defining work. She has been awarded more than $25 million in funding for her research, and currently has some $2.5 million in annual support.
Douglas Ziedonis is a professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine and Executive Vice President of the UNM Health Sciences Center and the CEO of the UNM Health System. His research focuses on the intersection of mental illness and substance abuse and has been particularly impactful for the prevalence of tobacco use and associated health harms among schizophrenic patients.
His work has been continuously funded for over 25 years with 118 grants and has produced 328 publications/scholarly works including 146 original research articles, 21 invited articles, 9 books, 42 chapters in edited volumes, 20 behavioral therapy manuals, 12 organizational change and leadership development manuals, etc.
His work has been placed in the most prestigious journals in his field. Dr. Ziedonis’ research has not only examined methods of treating substance abuse that co-occurs with serious and persistent mental illness but has promoted organizational change within the medical and mental health provider communities to challenge widespread de facto acceptance of tobacco use among patients with some forms of mental illness.