Alumni Couple: Two Very Different Careers

By Todd Fuqua

It’s a long way from Jal, New Mexico, to the island of Maui in Hawaii, but that’s the trajectory that Rex Hunter’s (MBA 80 BBA 77) professional career has taken.

For his wife, Dr. Jann (Dalbom) Hunter (MED 84 BSE 77), hasn’t found herself in such far-flung locales, but her career has been just as rewarding.

“It was a privilege for me to come back (to Eastern New Mexico University) as a faculty member,” said Jann, who recently retired as an education and curriculum specialist at ENMU-Roswell. “It was also very fun to go back and be on that beautiful campus.”

Jann said her ENMU degrees served her well.

Rex and Dr. Jann Hunter

“I remember an experience in one community in which a board member visited my classroom and asked me where I went to college,” Jann remembers. “When I told her ENMU, she said, ‘I can tell. That’s where the good teachers come from.’”

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope at Haleakalā, Hawaii, the largest telescope in the world to study the surface of the sun.

For Rex, his career is about to wrap up with the construction completion of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope – the world’s largest solar telescope – located on top of Haleakalā in Hawaii. This assignment caps a 30-plus-year career working for the National Solar Observatory, most of it while stationed in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, administering the National Solar Observatory on Sacramento Peak.

“Even though I’m contracted by the government, we’re running a business,” Rex said. “At Sunspot, we were essentially running a small town.”

When Rex and Jann first came to Sunspot, they didn’t live in Cloudcroft, they were in a residence at the Sunspot Observatory. Almost everyone that worked there lived on the grounds, and Rex and Jann raised their children in Sunspot, along with all the other scientists and astronomers’ families.

One of the first projects he was tasked with was the construction of the Sunspot visitors center.

“My boss, when I first started working at Sunspot, took me to the visitor center at the VLA (Very Large Array) near Socorro, New Mexico, and told me we were going to build a visitors center just like this,” Rex said. “We talked to our congressmen to get us some money, acquired some Scenic Byway matching funds and finished it in five years.”

The National Science Foundation – which has operated the observatory since 1977 – transferred management of the Sunspot Observatory to New Mexico State University in 2016, which in turn worked to create the Sunspot Solar Observatory Consortium which has run the telescope since late 2017.

Rex has spent most of his time in the last 10 years managing the business side of the Hawaii project scheduled for completion in September. He plans to retire after the grand opening.