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M A G A Z I N E THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO I ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
Science, Solitude, Sacrifice Life In The Time of Coronavirus
Contents 14 RISING TO THE CHALLENGE UNM graduates, faculty, students and staff pitch in to fight coronavirus
16 RUNNING TOWARD INFECTION Atlantan Peter Hicks (’05 MPH)
deploys with CDC teams to hotspots By Leslie Linthicum
18 CRAZY, WEIRD, SAD A nursing student’s stint in a New York City emergency department By Leslie Linthicum
Journalist Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi (’08 BA) returned to her home on the Navajo Nation to cover the COVID-19 outbreak. Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
20 ON THE RESERVATION Journalism grad returns home to
5
LETTERS
5 ALBUM
Keeping current with classmates
7
MESSAGE
From UNM President Garnett S. Stokes
8 CAMPUS CONNECTIONS
What’s going on around campus
12 HIGHER EDUCATION’S BIGGEST TEST The Fall semester looks completely different By Leslie Linthicum
cover Navajo outbreak By Leslie Linthicum
21 STOPPING A KILLER UNM’s novel approach
to treatment research By Leslie Linthicum
22 THE RACE FOR A VACCINE
UNM researchers join global sprint By Leslie Linthicum
On the cover: Freshmen in the Combined BA/MD Degree Program — from left, Jaanai Martinez of Albuquerque, Sean McNally of Farmington and Nadia McDonald of Taos — adapt to the new normal on the UNM campus. Photo: Roberto E. Rosales ('96 BFA, '14 MA)
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MIRAGE MAGAZINE
Mirage was the title of the University of New Mexico yearbook until its final edition in 1978. The title was then adopted by the alumni magazine, which continues to publish vignettes about UNM graduates and news of the University.
M A G A Z I N E
26 FOOD FOR THOUGHT Alumnus Erik Mettler (’00 BA, ’02 MPA) takes on food safety By Benjamin Gleisser
28 CAUTION AND A LONG LENS UNM grad suits up to photograph New Mexico in coronavirus crisis By Leslie Linthicum
29 THE OILCLOTH QUEEN An alumna’s pandemic-proof
Mexican import business By Leslie Linthicum
30 A LOT ON HIS MIND
32 A MOTHER’S SELFLESS LOVE
By Irene Gray and Rose Romero
34 SHELF LIFE
Fall 2020, Volume 40, Number 2 The University of New Mexico Garnett S. Stokes, President
Books by UNM alumni
Connie Beimer, InterimVice President, Alumni Relations
40 ALUMNI PROGRAMS
UNM Alumni Association Executive Committee
41 FROM THE VEEP A message from Alumni Association’s Connie Beimer
42 ALUMNI NETWORK
Snapshots from Alumni events
43 IN MEMORIAM
New Alumni Association President Chad Cooper (’01 MBA) on race and social change By Leslie Linthicum
Chad Cooper (’01 MBA) President Mike Silva (’95 BA) President-Elect Alexis Tappan (’99 BA, ’17 MA) Past President Joe Ortiz (’14 BBA) Treasurer Connie Beimer (’76 BA, ’79 MPA) Secretary Appointed Members John Brown (’72 BBA) Amy Miller (’85 BA, ’93 MPA) Jim Novak (’96 MBA) Jaymie Roybal (’12 BA/BS, ’16 JD) P. Michael Padilla ( ’03 BBA, ’07 MBA) Roberta Ricci ( ’06, ’09 MBA) Daniel Trujillo (’07 BBA, ’08 MACCT) Mirage Editorial Connie Beimer, Interim Vice President Leslie Linthicum, Editor Wayne Scheiner & Company, Graphic Design Sarah Wheeler, Senior Marketing Representative Address correspondence to MirageEditor@unm.edu or The University of New Mexico Alumni Association, MSC 01-1160, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-0001. You can also contact us at (505) 277-5808 or 800-ALUM-UNM (800-258-6866). Web: UNMAlumni.com Facebook: Facebook.com/UNMAlumni Instagram: Instagram.com/UNMAlumni
Alumni Association President Chad Cooper (’01 MBA) Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
Flickr: Flickr.com/UNMAlumni Twitter: @UNMAlumni
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Letters to the editor FROM THE EDITOR:
A
s we were putting the Spring 2020 issue of Mirage to bed last February, UNM’s campus was bustling with students, ideas and activities. And the topic of one of our main stories in the issue — emotional campus protests against the Vietnam War 50 years ago — seemed like a page from a history text. Well, here we are six months later. The nuts and bolts of the Fall semester college experience, as you will learn from UNM administrators in our story Campus Life, Coronavirus Edition (page 12), are quite different from the way they were in the Spring semester, before concerns about spreading the novel coronavirus forced classes and graduation ceremonies online and most of us into the isolation of our homes. Meanwhile, protests in the streets have been more alive this year than they have been since Vietnam as the Black Lives Matter movement surges and the nation takes up a conversation about racism and police brutality. Some days it feels as though everything is changing — for the better and the worse — in an instant. Predicting the future seems like a fool’s errand. The making of this issue of Mirage was also different. Interviews were done almost exclusively by phone or Zoom and photos were taken with distancing precautions. Despite the physical distance, I found the people profiled inspiring and a welcome reminder that life does go on and the UNM community continues to rise to challenges and inspire even — and especially — when times are tough.
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TO THE EDITOR:
I
Leslie Linthicum MirageEditor@unm.edu
MIRAGE MAGAZINE
just sat down and read the recent Mirage cover to cover. It was the best ever. The cover story on Joy Harjo made me so proud to be a Lobo and to have shared an alma mater with such a gifted person. I also felt a connection with the folks you interviewed from 1970. Thanks for putting so much thought and effort into creating such a meaningful piece.
Melissa Porter (’89 BBA) Berkeley, Calif.
T
hank you for the excellent article Battle Lines. The story brought tears to my eyes. What a powerful story being told by the people who were there and who showed immense courage. UNM has always been a place where civil rights and advocacy are hashed out. I’m proud of the progressiveness that happens there and the recognition of cultures and history. Well done Mirage! I’m happy to be a part of UNM.
Lynne Garramone Mason (’86 MA) Denver, Colo.
SPRING 2020
M A G A Z I N E THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO I ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
A Life In Verse Joy Harjo Is U.S. Poet Laureate
W
hile I was full of anti-war sentiment at the time, I was initially unconvinced that the campus, as an enclave of learning, was the right venue for expressing opposition to the U.S. role in the Vietnam conflict. That changed abruptly, when after playing tennis I naïvely went to the SUB in search of a cold soda, and stumbled into a confrontation about to erupt as the student occupation was to be forcefully ended. I felt myself lucky to have avoided bayonets, and quickly decided that our own government was a greater threat to my safety and well-being than any communist conspiracy or the Viet Cong could ever be. Nothing promotes radicalism like a government using violence against its own people exercising their rights. In recent years, I have heard my own students joke about “May the 4th be with you” as a Star Wars reference, with no awareness whatsoever about the Kent State anniversary. It is a shame to lose lessons dearly purchased.
I
have an entirely different view of the events on UNM campus in the spring of 1970. I believe it was a time when anarchists caused the school to be shut down. I remember the marching in the streets blocking traffic, the burning of the ROTC building, people sitting in front of the doors of the engineering building preventing those of us who wanted to learn something from doing so, etc. It was not a glorious and wonderful time as described in your article. Like those included in your article, my convictions were also hardened, but in the opposite direction of euphoria. My feelings were of disgust at those who got their way in spite of the thoughts of others. I am sure that this divergent view of the events will go unpublished but at least I voiced my protest against the one-sided article.
“The Street Vet” Doctors Homeless Animals / Geology Grad Looks to Jupiter May 1970: Alumni Recall Conflict and Violence / Soundpack: They’re Big and Brassy and Rocking The Pit
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Regards, Jon Stark (’73 BS, ’77 MA) Castle Pines, Colo.
Robert Simpson (’73 BSEE, ’79 MSEE) Canyon, Texas
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e reflected and “lived again” our 1970 UNM graduating days through your excellent “Battle Lines Being Drawn” article and interviews. Though we lived more in the country,s cultural “mainstream” than those activists you documented, it would be a grave error to think we were unaffected by them. Being centered through our UNM years in faithbased groups, we were drawn to intensive re-examinations of Biblical interpretations and implications for our lives. And the call to being part of the radical changemakers of our generation was largely fulfilled in social justice initiatives such as establishing and overseeing a Saturday program with poor children, which lasted for years. I, Dale, did greatly benefit from attending a “teach-in” across from the campus during the week of cancelled finals, led by a militant black student. And in the right place, I, like John Dressman in your article, could easily have been taking a great picture and surrounded and harmed by the Guard. And I, Mary Charlotte, felt very close to the confrontations on campus, instructed during a math test to immediately drop our pencils and take the back exit to get off campus — avoiding the National Guard. It makes sense that under slightly different circumstances we, too, could have been caught in the middle of the action. We married the day after graduation (about to celebrate 50 years!), and I had a high draft lottery number; so much could have been different.
Dale Elliott (’70 BSEE) Mary Charlotte Beeson Elliott (’70 BSEd) Lake Conroe, Texas
T
The article “Handcuffs and Bayonets” in the Spring 2020 edition of The Mirage seemed somewhat one-sided. Each of the quotations in the article was from a student or faculty member who was clearly in sympathy with Jane Fonda and her political beliefs. Nor was there any mention of the fact that the University was forced to close down, end the semester and cancel graduation ceremonies. As a graduating UNM senior at the time, I was disappointed that my diploma would be mailed to me rather than presented at a ceremony witnessed by my family. A greater effort to show a balanced picture would have been in order. For example, why couldn’t one of the ROTC students that were harassed been located and interviewed?
Look for a friend on every page! Send your alumni news to Mirage Editor, The University of New Mexico Alumni Association, MSC 01-1160, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 871310001. Or better yet, email your news to Alumni@unm.edu. Please include your middle name or initial and tell us where you’re living now. Deadlines: Spring deadline: January 1 Fall deadline: June 1 1960s John P. Bundrant (’60 BSEE), Albuquerque, and Martha Bundrant were married May 21, 1955, and celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary this year.
George J. Friberg (’62 BSME, ’83 MBA) and Mary E. Friberg, Albuquerque, celebrated Scott Sitzer (’70 BA) their 60th wedding anniversary on December Arlington, VA. 17, 2019.
I
was on campus in 1970 as a third year law student at the UNM Law School and was serving as Student Bar Association president. In response to all of the protests and violence on campus, the New Mexico State Legislature asked me and the UNM Student Body president, John Thorson, to go to Santa Fe and testify. We described how angry and upset students were about developments in the Vietnam War and at Kent State. In response, the Legislature closed the University. My classes and final exams were cancelled and I received my law degree. That was a very difficult time in UNM history indeed!
John Echohawk (’67 BA, ’70 JD) Boulder, Colo.
Continued on page 39
Dawn Fritz Hopkins (’60 BFA), Edmond, Okla., published “Parthur, the Story of an Orphaned Bobcat.” Fritz also was elected president of the Oklahoma City Town Hall. Tommy B. Thompson (’61 BS, ’63 MS, ’66 PhD), Reno, Nev., celebrated his 100th student advisee completing their geology degree. Thompson has made a career as a geology faculty member at several universities, and as a consultant to the minerals industry. Bernard “Gig” Brummell (’62 BBA), Albuquerque, has been honored with an “Award of Distinction,” from the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame. Brummell is a former Lobo basketball and baseball player. Nasario García (’62 BA, ’63 MA), Santa Fe, N.M., was recently featured in Shebana Coelho’s film, “Nasario Remembers the Río Puerco.” In the film, García returns to the now-abandoned villages of his youth Nasario Garcia in New Mexico’s Río Puerco Valley to revive stories and ghosts in a landscape that also remembers him.
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Our UNM Legacy
“We have UNM in our estate plans because it is our home town university. When we were there in the early 1970s we appreciated its affordability, flexibility, and in the case of the College of Engineering, its national reputation. We hope that it remains accessible to all New Mexico students who want to go to college in the future.” - Jerry Walker (BS ‘76) and Randi Jones Walker, PhD (BUS ‘74)
In their estate plan, Jerry and Randi have provided support for University College and the College of Engineering. They are members of the New Horizons Society, a group honoring individuals and families who have included UNM in their estate plans. For more information about how you can create a legacy at UNM or to share that you’ve already done so, please call (505) 313-7610 or email giftplanning@unmfund.org.
Look forward by giving back.
@UNMFund
UNMFoundation
@UNMFund
505-313-7600
Connected by the Unexpected
I
t’s safe to say that, no matter where you are reading this today, your world has changed dramatically over the last six months. We have been faced with a global pandemic, struggling economies and calls for social change amid heartbreaking acts of racial injustice — just to name a few of the issues dominating news cycles — all while balancing our own physical and mental well-being. We have all been greatly affected by the current crises and are doing our best to grapple with these issues. Although it can sometimes be hard to find the positives, it has been recognized by many that hardships we have experienced have brought us closer together. Yes, there is division and disagreement, but more notably, there is an overwhelming sense of unity as people come together to protect friends and family, support communities and keep our nation and the world moving forward together. We’ve been connected by each unexpected scenario we’ve faced — by shared experiences and coming together to overcome obstacles. We’ve also connected in completely unforeseen ways as we find new, physically distant means to meet with and support each other. And just as you connect with your friends, family and colleagues, remember that you are forever connected to a vast Lobo alumni association that can support you as well. To paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, the only constant in life is change. And the changes we face today are some of the most transformative many of us have ever experienced in our lives. No matter your circumstances, I hope that your confidence in your ability to adapt never wavers, because Lobos are prepared for change. Lobos are problem solvers and critical thinkers. They’re addressing these challenges and changing the world by urgently researching vaccines, championing social movements, finding solutions to keep small businesses open, bringing health care to rural areas in critical need and much more. More specifically, here at UNM, students, staff and faculty are addressing issues head on in numerous ways. At the start of the pandemic, UNM engineers, biologists and mathematicians engaged with community partners to study, design and produce effective face masks and assess ways to safely disinfect them for reuse. Dozens of UNM students have worked at or with the New Mexico Department of Health throughout the crisis tackling critical tasks such as contact tracing and data analysis. These are just a few of the numerous examples of Lobos acting fast to move New Mexico and the world forward. We will continue to learn and adapt for a better tomorrow — because you, Lobos, are resilient, innovative and, most importantly, part of a pack that protects and promotes one another.
Take care, stay safe and let’s go Lobos!
Garnett S. Stokes President, The University of New Mexico
Glen M. Tarleton (’69 BSEE) and Anne C. Tarleton (’71 BA, ’74 MA, ’76 PhD), Taos, N.M., celebrated 50 years of marriage on August 16, 2019. The couple met while attending UNM and were married at UNM's Aquinas Newman Center.
Glen and Anne Tarleton
1970s Peggy (Margaret) McCreary (’71 BM), Englewood, Colo., received an American Orff-Schulwerk Association (AOSA) Distinguished Service Award in 2018. This award is AOSA’s highest honor and recognizes those who have supported AOSA’s mission through exemplary service in music education at the national level. David W. Jessen (’72 BBA), Raleigh, N.C., was inducted into the Anderson School of Management Hall of Fame this year. Jessen is currently executive in residence in the Department of Accountancy and Business Law at the University of North Carolina. Channing R. Kury (’74 JD), Commack, N.Y., has published “The Symphony of the Mind: A Letter to my Sons.” Renatte K. Adler (’75 BA, ’78 PhD), San Diego, Calif., worked on elephant conservation in South Africa in 2017, and is currently a nature interpreter at the San Diego Zoo & Safari Renatte K. Adler Park. She is a retired professor of International Business and Economics at San Diego State University. Joy Harjo (’76 BA), Tulsa, Okla., has been appointed for a second term as U.S. Poet Laureate. She is the first Native American to serve as Poet Laureate and will continue to focus on Joy Harjo her signature project, “Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry.”
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Campus Connections
Hansel Burley
NEW DEANS
and Research, associate dean for Academics and Data, and associate dean for education undergraduates. Burley’s research examines diversity issues, particularly as they relate to college access and success, as well as institutional research and effectiveness. He is the past president of the Traditionally Black Colleges and Universities — Special Interest Group. He received his B.A. in English Communication Arts from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, an M.A. in English from Stephen F. Austin State University and his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University.
EDUCATION & HUMAN SCIENCES Hansel Burley, a scholar of diversity and college access and success, has joined UNM as dean of the College of Education & Human Sciences. Burley comes to UNM from Texas Tech University, where he most recently served as professor of Educational Psychology and chair of the Educational Psychology and Leadership Department, which he led through curriculum reform, graduate review and strategic planning. Provost James Holloway praised Burley’s leadership and background in mentoring, student belonging, resilience and student achievement. “Much of his work takes a view through a lens of diversity — including factors of race and gender as important characteristics shaping outcomes for students,” Holloway said. At Texas Tech, Burley served as associate dean for Graduate Education
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MIRAGE MAGAZINE
Robert Alexander González
ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING
Also coming to UNM from Texas Tech is Robert Alexander González, the new dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. González, a registered architect, wore two hats at Texas Tech University at El Paso — director of the architecture
program and director of the El Paso Regional Site, where he managed undergraduate education, student recruiting, admissions, fundraising, strategic planning and graduation, and supervised all faculty on the El Paso campus. In El Paso, he helped expand the site to include historic preservation studies, as well as new degrees in retail, hotel and institutional management. González worked to engage the campus in the city’s downtown renaissance and hopes to encourage the same kind of partnerships between the UNM School of Architecture and Planning and Albuquerque and Santa Fe. González said he was impressed with the connection between the school and community and the influence the school has had on planning and design in New Mexico. “This is a model for other institutions that want to integrate multiple disciplines that are strongly rooted in community engagement,” he said. González received his undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Texas at Austin, a master’s from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley.
ANDERSON SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT Provost Holloway praised Mitzi Montoya’s wealth of experience as well as her “entrepreneurial spirit and drive” in welcoming her as the new dean of the Anderson School of Management.
“I truly believe she will be a shot in the arm for business development in New Mexico,” he said. Montoya comes to UNM from Washington State University, where she was a professor in the Carson College of Business. Prior to joining WSU, Montoya served as dean of the business school at Oregon State University and dean of the College of Technology & Innovation at Arizona State University.
She received her B.S. in applied engineering science and Ph.D. in marketing and statistics from Michigan State University.
FINE ARTS
Montoya said she views Anderson as a model for business schools of the future, in which a diverse body of future business leaders are prepared to face the challenges ahead with resilience and adaptability. Her research lies at the intersection of marketing, technology and innovation and has focused on virtual teams and collaborative technology. “As we have all experienced with the coronavirus pandemic, where we are all working and learning remotely,” she says, “virtual work is not quite the same, and doing it well is easier said than done.”
Patricia Di Vasto (’79 BSED, ’82 MA), Rio Rancho, N.M., was named one of the 2020 Women of Influence by Albuquerque Business First. She is currently a principal at Rio Rancho Public Schools. Diane Reyna (’78 BUS), Santa Fe, N.M., was recognized as a “Trailblazer” by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. She was honored for her work in New Mexico media during Women’s History Month. She worked as a videographer with KOAT-TV and produced the documentary “Surviving Columbus.”
Harris Smith
Mitzi Montoya
Frank K. Wilson (’76 JD), Alamogordo, N.M., was named by the New Mexico Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission as a new commission member. Wilson served as a judge for Otero and Lincoln counties for 14 years until his retirement in 2009.
Harris Smith, a theater actor, stunt coordinator and fight choreographer, is the new dean of the College of Fine Arts. “Harris Smith brings wonderful broad thinking to the role,” Provost Holloway said. “He is dedicated to the critical role the arts play in our society and in defining our humanity.” Smith said he is looking forward to working within the college to empower underrepresented people in the state and to foster relationships with New Mexico’s active film industry. Smith comes to UNM from the University of Utah, where he was chair of the theater department. Prior to that he was director for the school of theater and film at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and taught at SUNYAlbany and Webster University.
1980s Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith (’80 MA), Corrales, N.M., along with other Native women artists, has gained recognition for her art critiquing North American settler culture featured in the exhibition “Indelible Ink.” It was featured at the University of New Mexico Art Gallery and the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. Joan Cotter Moss (’81 MA), Albuquerque, has published “Blessings for a Grieving Mother.” Linda A. Morton (’82 BSED), Harvard, Ill., has published “Middle School Blues: Rite of Passage.” John T. Chavez (’83 BBA), Albuquerque, was inducted into the Anderson School of Management Hall of Fame this year. Chavez is the vice president and CFO at Alvarado Realty Company. Judith K. Nakamura (’83 BA, ’89 JD), Placitas, N.M., announced her retirement from the New Mexico Supreme Court, where she has served as chief justice. Before joining the Supreme Court, she Judith K. Nakamura served nearly three years as a Second Judicial District Court judge and more than 14 years as a Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court judge.
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Campus Connections Smith is certified to teach stage combat through the Society of American Fight Directors. He has worked as an actor and fight director at several regional theaters, including Utah Shakespeare Festival, ACT in Seattle, St. Louis Black Repertory, Sacramento Theatre Company and the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. He earned his B.A. in theater arts from Montana State University (where he also played on the national champion Bobcats football team) and his M.F.A. from the University of Washington.
REFORMING YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS For a psychoactive drug to take effect in a user’s brain, signals need to pass from one neuron to another across a gap between cells. One cell releases chemicals into the gap and the other cell detects the chemicals using receptors on the cell’s membrane.
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Yi He, assistant professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has found that these specialized chemical receptors seem to play an important role in drug addiction. An individual suffering from drug addiction has fewer receptors, on average, than a person who has not used drugs, he explains. This reduced number of receptors makes it painful to stop using drugs, encouraging the cycle of addiction. His research, funded by one of UNM’s Grand Challenges awards, centers on the role of a protein called PICK1, which is responsible
for embedding and removing certain receptors from the cell membrane. It could play a role in recalibrating the amount of stimulation drugs cause in the brains of frequent drug users. “The ideal scenario,” he says, “is that we want to restore the regular number of receptors, so that [the patient] will receive the same amount of stimulation
as before they took drugs — basically, restore them to who they were before they started to take drugs.” He and his team are using a highperformance computing cluster to perform computational modeling to study the interactions between PICK1 and receptors with the goal of developing a drug that could help millions of Americans struggling with drug addiction.
CHANGING DIETS Maize — commonly known in the U.S. as corn — is perhaps the most important plant ever domesticated by humans and is now consumed by people and animals to the tune of about a billion tons a year. But when did maize become a staple of the human pantry? UNM Anthropology professor Keith Prufer, writing in the journal Science Advances, reveals the first direct evidence of the adoption of maize as a dietary staple by humans. His research relies on dozens of wellpreserved human skeletons found in two very remote rock shelter sites in the Bladen Nature Reserve in Belize. To determine the presence of maize in the diet of the ancient Mayans, Prufer and his colleagues measured carbon isotopes in the bones and teeth of 52 skeletons — males and females, adults and children — who lived from between 9,600 and 1,000 years ago. The analysis shows the oldest remains were people who ate wild plants, palms, fruits and nuts found
Mollianne Robison (’83 BS, ’96 MA), Albuquerque, was recently inducted into the National Education Association New Mexico Hall of Fame.
in tropical forests and savannahs, along with meat. By 4,700 years ago, diets had become more diverse, with some individuals showing the first consumption of maize. Maize became a staple in diets — accounting for about 70 percent of food consumption — about 4,000 years ago. “After that,” Prufer says, “people never stopped eating corn,
leading it to become perhaps the most important food crop in the Americas, and then in the world.”
SUZY’S SECRET Ian Wallace, assistant professor of anthropology at UNM, and colleagues from the University of Southern California and Harvard, have focused their research lens on one very special chimpanzee to try to settle an academic debate about whether living primates and their human ancestors have pronounced
curves in their finger and toe bones due to genetics or as a result of lifetimes of climbing trees and hanging from branches. Wallace and his collaborators took advantage of a unique piece of evidence, the hand and foot bones of a chimpanzee named Suzy. Suzy was captured as an infant in Africa and shipped by boat in 1931 to Gertrude Lintz, a wealthy socialite and exotic animal collector in Brooklyn, N.Y. Lintz raised Suzy and other chimpanzees to live like human children, training them to wear clothes and shoes, sit in chairs, eat with cutlery and sleep in beds. Most importantly to Wallace’s research, Lintz raised her chimpanzees to walk on two feet and restricted and their opportunities to climb and hang from trees. After she died in 1941, Suzy’s skeleton was donated to Harvard University’s Peabody Museum and preserved. When Wallace learned of the skeleton, he realized it could hold important information. And it did. Rather than being straight like human foot and hand bones, Suzy’s were just as curved as those of wild chimpanzees, suggesting that curvature is one feature of bone structure that is probably largely determined by genetics.
Marietta Patricia Leis (’85 MA, ’88 MFA), Albuquerque, renowned visual artist, has had artwork on display recently at the Incheon Culture & Arts Center in the Republic of Korea, and at the Marietta Patricia Leis Tan Avi Culture Avlusu Art Gallery in Sirkeci, Istanbul. Larry Torres (’85 MA), Taos, N.M., was named Teacher of the Year by the Taos News in 2019. He also retired from UNMTaos after teaching there since 2010. Ireena Erteza (’86 BSEE), Albuquerque, was recognized in 2019 as a Woman Worth Watching by Profiles in Diversity Journal. Throughout her career she has acted as a mentor and advocate for diversity and inclusion in STEM. She was nominated after initiating a project to increase career growth opportunities for women and minorities at Sandia National Laboratories. Scott Elder (’88 BA, ’97 MA, ’17 MBA), Albuquerque, was named Albuquerque Public Schools interim superintendent. Elder will head the state’s largest school district, with roughly 80,000 students.
Scott Elder
Carolyn M. Fittipaldi (’88 BA), Albuquerque, became the new marketing director for the Education Trust Board of New Mexico. She was previously the regional marketing and communications manager at Dreamstyle Remodeling. John Landis (’88 MBA), Albuquerque, joined the Nusenda Credit Union board of directors for a three-year term. He is the senior team member and inventory analyst at Stryker Orthopedics. (continued on page 31)
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Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
CAMPUS LIFE, CORONAVIRUS EDITION
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MIRAGE MAGAZINE
Planning for an uncertain future
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hether you were among the class of 1927 or 2017, this Fall semester at UNM doesn’t look much like you remember. Faced with health and safety concerns about the deadly, infectious COVID-19 virus, UNM officials worked over the summer to carve out a path to some semblance of normal for the Fall semester. But it comes with big changes for faculty, staff and students: Face masks are required, along with distancing of six feet. The campus population is capped at 5,000 to 6,000 people daily, down from the usual 30,000. Only 2,000 students are allowed to live on campus and all residence hall rooms are singles. Hallways are marked for one-way traffic. And most classes are taught online. The semester will also be shorter, ending effectively at the Thanksgiving break, with finals all taken online. And — not surprising in the coronavirus world, where sudden outbreaks can upend the best-laid plans — that is all subject to change. Many colleges and universities — from Harvard to the California State University system — have opted to teach all classes online this fall. UNM tried to strike a balance between preserving some faceto-face instruction and keeping the UNM community safe, President Garnett S. Stokes said. “We’re clearly trying to protect the health and well-being of our students and our faculty and staff and our community,” Stokes said. Stokes said science and data — what is known about how the novel coronavirus is transmitted and its rate of spread in New Mexico — drove the administration’s decision-making. But she said feedback from students who saw their Spring semester end online also played a role. “Everything that we know from our students is that they want to be here in person,” she said. “Some did love online and the flexibility of it, but most did not find the
By Leslie Linthicum experience to be what they were looking for. So we wanted to have some in-person presence for students who want that. We’re really just trying to provide the right balance.” A small number of Main Campus courses — 6.5 percent — are being conducted as they were pre-coronavirus, completely in person. Those classes look markedly different, however. Students and faculty are required to wear face coverings (either a mask or a shield), and seating maintains at least six feet distance between people. Another 23 percent of courses are scheduled to meet once a week in person with the rest of coursework delivered online. The rest of classes are completely conducted online. Under the hybrid plan, Tuesdays are the busiest day on campus, with 2,500-3,000 faculty and staff working, 2,000 students in residence halls and 1,000 students attending in-person classes. Most students on campus are in their first year at UNM, and consideration was given to providing them with a somewhat traditional introduction to the college experience. Cutting the Spring semester short and planning to reopen in the Fall was an unprecedented challenge, Stokes said, compounded by the changing trajectory of the virus spread. Early predictions were that COVID-19 would peak in the spring and summer and be on its way out in the fall. Under that scenario, school would end at Thanksgiving break, when a predicted resurgence was predicated. Instead, cases surged in summer. “Trying to predict where this virus is going is impossible,” Stokes said. “So much is changing so fast. This is an unprecedented period. It challenges every aspect of how we think about what we do in higher education.” Administrators worked all spring and summer on the challenge of
what is effectively shutting down and then reopening a small city. In early summer as cases in New Mexico began to climb, Stokes came close to pulling the plug on in-person classes. “Quite honestly, I was just about ready to say we were going all online in the Fall,” she said. “We got more information, gathered more data and said, no, we seem to be on the right path.” While trying to plan for a safe campus re-opening, administrators were also planning for a cash-strapped future. With the state’s budget taking a hit from COVID-19 and plunging oil revenues, UNM’s budget took a $30 million hit. Meanwhile, the Athletics Department has struggled with planning for a future with coronavirus. “We’ve had more plans, more scenarios, more iterations,” Athletic Director Eddie Nuñez said. Cutting short the spring season cost $3.5 million in revenue. Then the Mountain West Conference canceled all fall sports, including football, men’s and women’s cross-country and women’s soccer and volleyball. That means an even bigger hit to the budget and frustration for players and fans. “COVID has really rocked everyone’s world in terms of finances,” Nunez said. “If we don’t have events, we don’t have fans in the stands and parking and concessions.” While tailgates and packing The Pit are outside the boundaries of physical distancing guidelines, so are many other cherished campus traditions — frat parties, concerts, even late-night dorm-room talks. Young people, unleashed after months of isolation orders and back to bars and restaurants, were blamed for the summer COVID-19 case spike. Stokes said she was heartened by the results on a nationwide survey in which college students said they were less inclined to party as campuses reopened. “We’re calling it ‘Protect the Pack,’ and we do think our students care about each other,” Stokes said. “We’re really hoping that our community will come together.” ❂
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ALL HANDS ON DECK UNM community pitches in to combat the new coronavirus By Leslie Linthicum
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hen a new pathogen began spreading across the country earlier this year, taking lives and locking down the economy, life changed — quickly and for the worse. Faced with the pandemic, many innovative UNM alumni, faculty, staff and students got to work doing what they do best — finding solutions to some of society’s most intractable problems. How could travelers arriving in the U.S. from international hotspots be identified and quarantined to slow the spread? How could nursing homes be made safer for the vulnerable elderly? Was our food supply safe? Could existing drugs be used to treat the symptoms of the novel coronavirus? What about a vaccine? The people and projects featured in this issue are just a sampling of UNM’s outreach and response to COVID-19. UNM’s influence also ranged from the highest level of decision-making about the state’s public health policies. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (’82 BUS, ’87 JD) is an alumna and her two key coronavirus cabinet secretaries were plucked from jobs at UNM’s Health Sciences Center. Even the go-to deaf interpreter of the state’s weekly coronavirus briefings — Nixo Lanning (’14 MA) — is a Lobo. Doctors and nurses trained at UNM cared for sick patients, students from the College of Population Health traced contacts among New Mexicans infected with COVID-19, faculty and staff turned to their sewing machines to make cloth masks to give to neighbors, and first responders and students in the School of Engineering used 3-D printers to make more sophisticated face protection. Stories of UNM’s response are as varied as individuals’ skill sets and imaginations.
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John Garrity, the UNM Alumni Association’s Lobos for Legislation committee chair, headed up an alumni effort to fill the need for hand sanitizer, which was in short supply at the beginning of the pandemic. The Alumni Association bought 100 gallons of hand sanitizer from Safe House Distilling Co., a local company owned by UNM alum Chris Leurig (’13 BA) and arranged for Lobo-themed “clean paws” jugs to be distributed across campus and delivered to UNM branch campuses in Valencia County, Los Alamos and Gallup and to health facilities in Gallup. When the disease began to move into New Mexico, Christina Salas (’08 MS, ’14 PhD), who has joint appointments in the schools of Medicine and Engineering and holds several patents for novel orthopedic inventions, recognized the need for protection for medical personnel dealing with an onslaught of contagious patients. In Gallup and in hospitals on the Navajo Nation, where the disease hit early and hard, medical personnel were tying multiple bandanas around their faces or fashioning shielding from plastic bags. “They were wearing anything they could get their hands on,” Salas says. “The School of Engineering was like, ‘We can just make stuff.’” So they did. Salas secured FDA guidelines for making masks and face shields and began designing a ventilator that was as effective as an N-95, could be worn comfortably for long periods of time, and reused. The result, which she and her lab students began printing around the clock, is an unusual multi-colored mask made of flexible thermoplastic polyurethane with a slot for off-the-shelf air conditioner filters. Her lab’s dozen 3-D printers began churning them out, producing 500 per week at the height of
production. As demand increased, Salas ordered four more 3-D printers and set them to work in the only space she had left — the kitchen and dining room of her home. Salas and others loaded the finished masks and face shields into their vehicles, along with boxes of water, diapers and food donations. “We’ve delivered 7,000 masks and face shields, mostly to the Navajo Nation and also hospitals in Gallup,” Salas says. When the threat of the infection’s spread canceled sports at UNM, student athletes pivoted to a host of activities to exercise other muscles — compassion, caring and community service. “Since Day One, when we had to deal with COVID and spring sports were canceled, we made a decision,” says UNM Athletic Director Eddie Nuñez. “We can’t control what’s going on around us, so let’s take this time to make sure our student athletes, coaches and staff are safe and then let’s focus on being a change agent for the community.” Lobo athletes began organizing food drives, collection and distribution of personal protective equipment for health workers, reading to school kids via Zoom and pitching in with their dollars to support Lobo-friendly restaurants by placing orders for takeout. As athletes returned to their hometowns for the summer, engagement continued. Senior offensive lineman Teton Saltes, a member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe, spent his spring and summer working out to stay in shape while also delivering food, water, medicine and other supplies on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. “They showed us what they’re really about,” Nuñez says. “Who they are as people.” ❂
Christina Salas ('08 MS, '14 PhD) models a mask made with 3-D printers in her laboratory. Photo: Courtesy School of Engineering
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RUNNING T O WA R D
THE HOTSPOTS
CDC’s Peter Hicks (’05 MPH) and lots of Lobos respond to the pandemic By Leslie Linthicum
Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
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ince the first cases of the new coronavirus were diagnosed in the U.S., Peter Hicks (’05 MPH) has been on the move. An epidemiologist and informatician for the past 15 years with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s health protection agency, Hicks has responded to multiple disasters and disease outbreaks — Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the response to the Zika virus and the H1N1 pandemic. Then came COVID-19. “This is 10 orders of magnitude more significant and more complex than anything I’ve ever been part of, in terms of population impact and the ongoing morbidity and mortality,” Hicks says. He’s speaking from Window Rock., Ariz., the capital of the Navajo Nation, where he has been embedded in the Navajo Epidemiology Center for weeks. It is his third deployment since Feb. 11, when he got a plane to San Francisco International Airport to screen passengers as they arrived from countries that were traveling from areas of concern for COVID-19 infections and exposures. “Goggles, face shield, gloves and mask,” Hicks says, describing his work uniform in the airport quarantine screening post. “Sometimes a gown, depending on the circumstance.” Quarantine screening was an effort to mitigate the importation of the virus from other countries. Guided by passenger manifests, public health screeners interviewed and assessed passengers who had traveled recently from China, Europe and the Middle East. Over the five weeks Hicks spent in San Francisco, the virus began to spread throughout the United States, hitting nursing homes and other long-term care centers especially hard. So, after returning to his home in Atlanta and quarantining for two weeks with his wife, Candice Welhausen (‘96 BA, ’01 MA, ’09 PhD), Hicks was off to Pennsylvania to assess significant outbreaks in several long-term health care facilities. They were, as Hicks puts it, “outbreaks within the outbreak.” He spent nearly three weeks in Pennsylvania, working with a multidisciplinary team from the CDC, the Pennsylvania Department
of Health, and the National Guard, along with staff and management from approximately 10 facilities. The CDC team interviewed local staff, evaluated local facility-level conditions and advised on the safe separation of patients and residents with COVID-19 and trained local staff in the proper wearing and disposal (donning and doffing) of personal protective equipment — or PPE — to prevent contamination. As Americans read about the stresses put on front-line care workers and the sadness in homes where the isolated elderly and frail suffered from COVID-19, Hicks was seeing that stress and sadness firsthand along with his teammates. “A lot of fear and anxiety,” he said. “It was highly charged and morale among the facility staff was pretty low, due to limited supplies of PPE, staff shortages, and rising infection rates among staff and residents.” A runner and a foodie, Hicks can usually destress on assignments with a jog and a good meal out at the end of a day. “But during COVID-19,” he says, “it’s been tough.” Restaurants closed during his Pennsylvania deployment, including the one at the hotel where the CDC team was staying. But hotel management allowed guests to use its kitchen. Hicks hosted one memorable meal of local Italian sausages grilled on the hotel’s patio. And, making the best of it in San Francisco, Hicks roamed the empty airport in his downtime on the late-night shift, taking photos of eerily empty concourses. After leaving Pennsylvania and completing another stint quarantining back in Atlanta, Hicks was deployed to the Navajo Nation, which was hit hard by the virus. Hicks, the head of the Alumni Association’s State of Georgia Chapter, has been struck during his deployments by the number of fellow UNM grads working to slow the spread of the virus and keep communities safe. “UNM has trained a whole bunch of people, and everywhere I go I am running into Lobos who are working on this,” Hicks says. On his 10-person team in Window Rock, he is working with epidemiologist Melissa Jim (’04 MPH), public health advisor Lori de Ravello (’89 BA) and physician Almea M. Matanock (’09 MD).
Working with the Navajo Nation’s Department of Health, Hicks was part of a team focused on contact tracing and case management, as well as teaching best practices for prevention. They also coordinated with FEMA on water deliveries and helping to develop gating measures to help tribal officials safely reopen the sprawling reservation. Originally from Virginia and a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University (art history and printmaking), Hicks traveled west to Albuquerque to study anthropology and archaeology. He used his expertise in geospatial data to work for UNM’s Health Sciences Center and eventually enrolled in the master’s in public health program. Upon graduating, he went directly to the CDC. While many public health professionals toil behind the scenes, the coronavirus pandemic has put the profession in the spotlight. “It’s really great and effective when local and federal public health authorities are able to deliver a solid and consistent message that is understood by the public,” Hicks says. “It’s disappointing and alarming when those guidelines aren’t followed or are ignored. I think most people in public health wish people would adhere to the guidelines more consistently.” After doing a double deployment on the Navajo Nation and returning to CDC headquarters in Atlanta in September, Hicks was awaiting new travel orders. “I’m kind of an eager beaver to deploy,” he says. Why? “My personal motivation is to improve population health and to help individuals who are disproportionately at risk for adverse health outcomes, either because of their socio-economic status or because they’re minority populations or they’re disenfranchised in some other way,” he says. “It’s also really interesting work to address complex public health problems.” His advice for Lobos? “Listen to the scientists, listen to your public health leaders. COVID-19 is apolitical. This is not the flu. This is completely different than the flu. I’m a big proponent of masks and social distancing. Collectively, we will get through this.” ❂
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Photos: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
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CRAZY, WEIRD, SAD UNM nursing student spends 10 weeks on the COVID front lines By Leslie Linthicum
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ver 10 weeks working as a nurse in the emergency department of Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., Alexandré Perrin saw more death and suffering than he had in the five years he worked as a travel nurse before coming to UNM for graduate studies. And more than he ever hopes to see again. Every bed filled with a COVID-19 patient. Tents outside to treat the overflow. A lack of ventilators, medications and nurses. And death all day, every day. “Hopefully it’s the closest I’ll ever be to a war zone,” says Perrin, who will graduate in 2021 with a master’s degree in nursing. Perrin volunteered to lend his nursing skills to the coronavirus pandemic after classes at the College of Nursing were cut short at the end of the spring semester. “I was staring at four months of nothing and I’m not the kind of person who can do that,” says Perrin, 27. Since earning his BSN from the University of Portland in 2014, Perrin worked as a travel nurse in emergency departments across the country. He thought he was finished with bedside nursing when he entered UNM’s master’s program with the aim of becoming a nurse practitioner in family practice. But he decided to re-up and look for one more posting. New York City was the nation’s COVID hot spot in the spring. Hospitals were filled to beyond capacity. And medical professionals were in short supply. “I walked in my first shift at 7 a.m.,” Perrin recalls. “I go into the Red Zone. Normally there are four patients per nurse, but there were 12 patients per nurse. Pretty much everyone was on a ventilator. And pretty much everyone died.” Working in emergency departments, Perrin was used to chaos and complicated medical scenarios. But almost nothing was normal during the peak of COVID-19 outbreak.
“It was all running. Very little charting,” Perrin says. “In terms of treatment, there was no playbook for COVID. There was no protocol. It was the Wild, Wild West.” Much of the challenge in an emergency department is to stabilize the sick or injured, figure out what is wrong with them and then try to make them better. “Not in COVID Land,” says Perrin. “We knew what was going on with these people. They had the diagnosis going in. But we couldn’t stop it.” And with every patient on a ventilator, Perrin lost the ability to communicate with patients as people, one of the aspects of the job that drew him to nursing. “Generally, no matter how bad things are, I try to talk to the person, reassure them. Say, ῾I got you,’” Perrin says. “It was really hard to do that. It was weird not to be able to see anyone’s faces. Only their eyes.” And, he says, most of those eyes showed panic and fear. Patients often went downhill fast, presenting at the hospital at the beginning of Perrin’s shift and dying before he ended his shift. They were mostly 60 or older with comorbidities, but others were younger. “And every one of them,” Perrin says, “was somebody’s mother or father or son or daughter.” Perrin arrived at Coney Island Hospital for his first shift on April 6 and worked seven days a week for the first and worst three weeks. As the city put into place a lockdown, he began to see the effects of quarantine on the number of patients being treated. “It was very clear the policy was working,” he says. Perrin had worked at nine hospitals in five states before enrolling at UNM, and one stint was at a hospital in Manhattan, so he knew firsthand the pulsating pace of New York.
This time, he says, “The city was a ghost town. Nothing was open. No one was going out. And if you saw someone on the street, they were wearing a mask.” At the end of each shift, Perrin walked a few blocks to the apartment he was renting, cooked, wrote in his journal and did yoga to de-stress. He did OK emotionally. “For those of us who work in critical care, you learn how to separate your emotions from the work,” Perrin says. But the experience solidified for him his decision to switch to family practice. Even before the COVID experience, Perrin was burned out on the daily cycle of work in an emergency department. “I didn’t feel like I was making much of a difference,” he says. “I felt like I was a walking Band Aid. I wanted to get outside of a hospital and actually be with people on the front end to try to prevent some things and keep people out of the hospital.” As summer classes at the College of Nursing resumed online, Perrin stayed in New York but cut back on his shifts at Coney Island Hospital to three days a week. Juggling the workload worked out, except for the weekend he was sick with a sore throat, cough, fever and drenching night sweats. He didn’t get tested for COVID-19 but, he says, “Pretty sure I did have it.” Back in Albuquerque, Perrin is working through his clinical rotations, enjoying interactions with patients and still not certain how to consider his 10 weeks in the belly of coronavirus. “It’s kind of a badge of honor, I guess,” he says. “I went out on the front lines of COVID. And it’s an end to my bedside nursing. One crazy, weird, sad last hurrah.” ❂
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Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
DEEP ROOTS Alumna goes home to tell Navajo Nation’s story By Leslie Linthicum
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ith her Ph.D. program in rhetoric and writing at UNM moving into spring break in March, it was an easy choice for Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi (’08 BA) to pack a bag and head to her childhood home on the Navajo reservation in eastern Arizona. Clahchischiligi, who spent 10 years as a sports writer for the Navajo Times before going back to school, wasn’t thinking about reporting on the novel coronavirus, which was just beginning to be found on the reservation. She just wanted to be with her family and help in a difficult time. And it never occurred to her that COVID-19 infections would explode on the reservation and in the border towns of Gallup and Farmington. “I was completely blown away as the disease progressed and things worsened,” she says. “For us, the reservation is a place
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that is untouched a lot of the time. We’re used to being the last place to have anything affect us. To me it was the safest place to be.” But it did spread, with the Navajo Nation rivaling New York City as a hotspot of the disease, with more than 7,000 confirmed cases and more than 350 deaths. As the crisis deepened, Clahchischiligi began to process it in a way that had become familiar — by telling the stories of her people. In an essay for The New York Times, a video diary for CBS This Morning, interviews on public radio and stories for the online news site Searchlight New Mexico, where she is a contributing writer, Clahchischiligi has shared the struggles and resilience of tribal communities facing the invisible threat of COVID-19.
Clahchischiligi grew up in Goat Springs, Ariz., graduated from Kirtland Central High School outside of Farmington and enrolled at Fort Lewis College and San Juan College before finding an academic home at UNM. A news writing instructor at Fort Lewis saw promise in Clahchischiligi and gave her a pamphlet about the American Indian Journalism Institute. Months later, Clahchischiligi applied to the Institute, was accepted and found a way to overcome her shyness and begin approaching strangers and telling their stories. At the time, Native Americans comprised 1 percent of American journalists — a statistic that holds true today, 15 years later. “I took that on as a challenge,” says Clahchischiligi. “I thought I want to change that.”
Clahchischiligi transferred to UNM and received a B.A. in communications and journalism in 2008 with a lot of experience under her belt. She did internships at newspapers in St. Cloud, Minn., Salt Lake City, Utah, Santa Fe and Albuquerque and at Sports Illustrated in New York City. After graduation, she took a job as a sports writer at the Navajo Times. “I realized I had reported everywhere else except home,” she says. “And I’ve always been a firm believer in telling the stories of my home.” Back home, Clahchischiligi got to eat her mother’s mutton stew and travel to the family’s sheep camp. Then, armed with notebook and pen, and often accompanied
by photographer Don Usner (’91 MA), she went out to Shiprock, Toadlena, Two Gray Hills and other communities, talking to farmers, elders and families dealing with loss and uncertainty and bringing her unique understanding and investment in the community to her stories. “I went in with open ears and an open mind,” she says. “I knew I had to use this platform that I’ve had for so long to tell the stories coming out of our community. And when your people are going through something like that, you want to help. I had to look out for my people.” The journey was filled with concern about her safety and also the safety of her family members. Would she become
A VIAL OF VIRUS
North Campus researchers combine efforts to search for a coronavirus drug By Leslie Linthicum
in the Department of Internal Medicine, who in early March received his FedExed shipment of a vial of the coronavirus — taken from the first patient in the United States diagnosed in Washington State. “This has been beyond anything I’ve ever experienced,” says Bradfute, an immunologist who has worked similarly toward vaccines and treatments for the Ebola and the Zika viruses. “In the sheer volume of work, in the sheer number of requests, in how much we’ve put aside our other work to concentrate on this — this has been on a whole hat if, in the vast library of FDAother level.” approved medicines, there already Since March, when the novel coronavirus existed an effective treatment to lessen the began sweeping across the United States, symptoms of the COVID-19 infection? If Bradfute has been working with many scientists could find it, the discovery would other scientists in UNM’s Health Sciences be a game-changer amid a global pandemic Center, who have been rifling through that has sickened millions, killed hundreds of the world’s medicine cabinet and testing thousands and ground economies to a halt. possible treatments. At UNM, only a handful of researchers One team includes Tudor Oprea, have access to a sample of the live COVID-19 M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Translational virus and have been testing hundreds of drugs Informatics Division in UNM’s Department against the virus since March. of Internal Medicine. Oprea and his The stakes and the urgency are not lost team rely on mathematical models and on Steven Bradfute, Ph.D., an assistant computer simulation to quickly thumb professor in the Division of Infectious through the database of drug molecules Disease and the Center for Global Health that might have antiviral properties.
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infected traveling across the reservation? Would she bring the disease back home? Clahchischiligi always wore masks and gloves and glasses. She put her hair up and covered it with a hat and kept her driver’s license and a credit card in a plastic bag. To show respect, she never arrived empty handed, passing out care packages of toilet paper and disinfecting wipes. “When I went out reporting and started talking to my people and seeing it for myself, it offered me something that I didn’t know that I needed,” Clahchischiligi says. “It offered me peace in a way. It calmed me down. It was really humbling.” ❂
Once Oprea’s team identifies a candidate, Larry Sklar, Ph.D., a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pathology, digs into his collection of drug samples containing those molecules. Those drugs are sent to Bradfute, who gets down to the nitty-gritty: His team adds the drug molecules to the cells of African green monkeys and exposes them to the live virus in his Level 3 biosafety lab. The process is made quicker and more efficient using a Sklar-developed technique called “assay miniaturization” that allows larger numbers of molecules to be tested in one batch. An old antiviral drug commonly used to treat diabetes has shown some promise, as has a drug tested in asthma treatment in Japan. Bradfute, who also works on potential treatments for Hantavirus and encephalitis viruses, has also been helping to test methods for decontaminating face masks and other personal protective equipment and trying to answer questions about the novel virus, such as how long it lives on various surfaces. “We have gotten a lot of requests,” Bradfute says. “The way I look at it is we have the lab capability, so we have a responsibility to try to help in any way we can.” ❂
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Photos: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
Bryce Chackerian
THE RACE IS ON UNM researchers join global effort to find a vaccine
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lmost as soon as COVID-19 reached the U.S., the race was on to find a vaccine against the deadly virus. At UNM, the race began on the third floor of a nondescript concrete building on North Campus, where two professors of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology turned a longstanding collaboration toward the new threat. David Peabody, Ph.D., turned to coronavirus research in mid-March and hasn’t let up.
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“I realized very early on that this is an all-hands-on-deck situation,” Peabody says. “For the last couple of months there probably hasn’t been a day that I didn’t work. But you just can’t stand by and watch this happen around you.” Peabody has spent decades studying a simple virus that infects bacteria. As a side project, he developed a technology that decorates the surface of virus-like particles made from harmless deactivated viruses with genetically engineered surface
proteins. These particles send the immune system into attack mode, triggering the production of virus-killing antibodies. “It was basic science,” he says. “When I started I had no idea what it might be good for.” When Bryce Chackerian, Ph.D., arrived at UNM in 2004, his vaccine research involved using genetically modified viruslike particles to trick the immune system into producing virus-killing antibodies. Chackerian was using the human
papillomavirus as his platform, which was difficult to make and could be made only in small batches. The two married Peabody’s “how” with Chackerian’s “why” and have been working together since. With campus emptying in March, Peabody worked in his lab “alone, with just my own two hands.” It took him only a week and a half to create his first vaccine candidates — each less than a milliliter of liquid in a tube. He walked it down the hall to Chackerian’s lab and handed it to a lab technician, who also happens to be his daughter, Julianne. After diluting the vaccine to the proper concentration, it was ready for Chackerian’s group to inject into lab mice. A few weeks later the mice got
a booster shot and then a sample of their blood serum was removed. The serum moved to another Health Sciences Center laboratory run by Steven Bradfute, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Disease and the Center for Global Health in the Department of Internal Medicine. Under tight biosafety precautions, Bradfute infects cells with live coronavirus to see if and how well the mouse antibodies can block infection. The scientists are repeating the procedure with half a dozen potential vaccines. Another aspect of UNM’s unique approach is a library it has made of virus-like particles that display every possible amino acid piece of the coronavirus, enabling a methodical way to develop vaccine candidates.
With serum from recovered mice or humans, Chackerian says, “We can take those antibodies and we can screen our library to identify the parts of the virus that are potentially vulnerable to antibody responses.” Traditionally it takes years to develop a vaccine. But the COVID-19 race has seen early success. Several other potential vaccines are already being tested in humans. Chackerian is excited about the progress and optimistic that some laboratory — and maybe many — will get a vaccine to market. It’s a race, but one where everyone involved is cheering for someone to get to the finish line quickly to reduce the suffering wrought by the newest coronavirus. ❂
David Peabody
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FIGHTING EVER.
THIS IS FAMILIA
Celebrations look different in 2020, We are one Pack, unite
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YIELDING NEVER.
LIAL TERRITORY
020, but some things never change. united and undivided.
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT Double alum takes on food safety By Benjamin Gleisser
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espite recent coronavirus outbreaks among workers at several meat packing plants and among some migrant fruit pickers at a handful of farms, America’s food supply is safe, assures Erik Mettler (’00 BA, ’02 MPA), the assistant commissioner for partnerships and policy within the Office of Regulatory Affairs in the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Unlike food-borne pathogens such as salmonella or E. coli, currently there is no evidence of food or food packaging being associated with the transmission of the coronavirus. Still, just as the COVID-19 pandemic has changed everyday life throughout the world, it is also changing life at the FDA, especially the way the agency conducts inspections of farms and food processing facilities. And Mettler is helping the government agency evolve to a “new normal.” “We had 5,000 investigators working all over the U.S., but once the lockdowns started, we couldn’t have them moving around the country to farms, restaurants and supermarkets, potentially spreading the disease,” Mettler says from his home office in North Potomac, Md. “We quickly realized the way we do inspections needed to change,” he says. “So, like many other American workers, our investigators began adjusting to working from home and we began developing remote regulatory and program assessment utilizing a variety of video conferencing services.” The remote assessments will complement, and not replace, in-person
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in public administration degree. His goal was to work in a local clinic or hospital. “Growing up in a health care world, I wanted to do something with my life that would make the world better,” he says. “I wanted to change things and fix things.” He credits Bruce Perlman, director of UNM’s School of Public Administration, with helping him recognize the importance of expanding health policy beyond the local level. “Dr. Perlman challenged me to think regionally and globally,” Mettler says. “He was very personable and took an interest in me, and provided valuable insights on where I could go on my career path.” Perlman isn’t surprised by Mettler’s Creating a Better World success in government policy. It is a big responsibility that fits in “As a student, he was smart and focused,” well with Mettler’s ambition, formed in Perlman says. “When he approached me to childhood, to make the world a better place. be the chair of his Professional Paper, I was Growing up a few blocks from the impressed that he knew not only what he campus, it was a given that he would attend wanted to study, but in which organization The University of New Mexico. Besides, he wanted to focus. His topic? Leadership UNM was a family affair: his father, Fred, change and employee attitudes in the FDA!” ran the radiology department at UNM After earning a master’s of public health Hospital, his mother, Gloria, earned an from Emory University, Mettler secured MBA, and brother Larsen received a B.S. an internship at the FDA as a public health in business. advisor. After several promotions, he wrote Mettler also met his wife, Amanda legislation that created the agency’s Office Carson (’02 BA), when both were members of the Center for Tobacco Products, then of the UNM swim team. Today, the couple served as the associate commissioner for has three children. (By the way, he’s still a Foods and Veterinary Medicine in the green chile fan.) Office of Foods and Veterinary Medicine, As an undergraduate, he worked in the where he oversaw production of feed psychiatric ward at University Hospital. and medication for food supply animals. And after receiving degrees in psychology He was appointed to his current position and sociology, he continued on for a master in 2018.
inspections. “In addition, we’re adjusting to how retail food sales are changing significantly, with online shopping and other new ways people are using to get food,” Mettler says. “We thought the need for new methods of inspection would take 10 years to develop, but COVID-19 has shortened that.” While oversight of meat, poultry and fish production falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, all other food products fall into the FDA’s bailiwick. The meat that goes on a frozen pizza is the USDA’s responsibility, whereas controlling the quality of the pizza itself falls under the FDA realm.
Streamlining Food Safety One of Mettler’s main initiatives is developing the Integrated Public Health System, which will combine not only local, state and FDA resources, but include information from other federal agencies, like the Department of Agriculture. Other facets of the integrated system include creating future models governing food and medical product safety, such as developing innovative technologies to help food and medical product inspection, as well as forming training guidelines for inspectors. In addition, the FDA is looking
to forge relationships with its counterparts in other countries to work more efficiently to create food and medical product safety worldwide, and measures to prepare for the eventuality of any future pandemic. Mettler also helped implement the Food Safety Modernization Act, which seeks to prevent foodborne illnesses like E. coli and salmonella from impacting the food supply (in the past, the FDA has focused on responding to bacterial outbreaks rather than trying to prevent them). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 48 million people in the
U.S. (one in six) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year from foodborne diseases. Basically, the program uses farm data stored at the state and local level to create a holistic supply chain. This improves the FDA’s ability to trace any food contamination to its source in real time. “It used to take days,” Mettler says. “Now, in some cases it can be in a matter of seconds.” Mettler’s original goal of making the world a better place has grown over the years. Today, he says, “I want to leave a better world for my children.” ❂
Photo: U.S. FDA
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FROM A DISTANCE
Photo: Anthony Jackson (’19 BA)
Alumnus suits up to document COVID-19
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he way award-winning photojournalist Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA) gets great photos can be boiled down to some simple rules: Get close. Spend time. Make connections. That all changed around the middle of March. “I had to adjust in every way, shape and form,” says Rosales, 51, a staff photographer for the Albuquerque Journal newspaper, lecturer in the Department of Film & Digital Arts and Mirage photographer. Almost overnight, common niceties and ice-breakers, such as shaking hands and visiting in someone’s home, became potentially deadly. Rosales had to rethink how he approached people and where he was comfortable taking photos. He loaded up on nitrile gloves, disposable masks and disinfectant wipes and his onthe-job look became unrecognizable. “I wear a mask, gloves and goggles,” says Rosales. “Every time.”
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Masks worn by subjects and photographers don’t help make the connections needed to capture a subject’s essence, an aspect of the job that Rosales misses. “It creates a distance for me and for the people I’m photographing,” says Rosales. “You want to see the person on the other side of the lens. And psychologically, when people put on that mask, that distancing radar kicks in.” He has come to rely on his zoom lenses to make up for the distance between himself and story subjects. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I’m photographing outside. And I don’t touch anything. I’m often 10 feet or more away, using a long lens.” The novel coronavirus swept through the Navajo reservation and border towns in western New Mexico and, despite the risks of traveling to a hot spot, journalists went to the news.
“I was nervous when I started going to the reservation because it was so bad out there,” Rosales says. “And I had to ask — is this morally right for me to go there? What if I spread disease while I’m here? What if I bring it home?” Rosales made his trips quick — out and back in a day. And he followed what has become his safety procedure: Wipe down all the cameras with disinfectant, clean the steering wheel, radio buttons and everything else in the car that got touched. And put clothes straight into the washing machine, then shower. It’s a lot like the routines followed by front-line medical professionals. And Rosales sees similarities between first responders and journalists. “I can’t do my job from a phone. You have to be there,” he says. “And the still image holds so much power in telling this story.” ❂
When that first pallet of fabric rolls were delivered to her home in Los Angeles, Molina waited until the kids had gone to school and started cutting out table cloths. This was before the Internet, so Molina marketed by calling stores and sending out sample packets. She quickly found a product representative and, as she says with a laugh, “It really got out of hand. The orders started flying in.” She quickly paid back her relatives, rented a warehouse with a loading dock and Oilcloth International never looked back. She was quickly selling cloth all over the nation and also manufacturing a catalog of products ranging from oilcloth aprons and placemats to tote bags and baby bibs. Her clients included Restoration Hardware, Crate and Barrel and The Gap. But Molina never wanted to be in the retail business and found happiness and profit in the business-to-business model, Alumna’s unexpected detour into the Mexican import business led and now sells yardage to a large number to a colorful and profitable career — and one that is COVID-19-proof of manufacturers. These days the oilcloth rolls arrive on semi-trucks at Molina’s 2,000-square-foot warehouse and she The year was 1994 and Cardie Molina chose Idea No. 3 — importing deals with vendors all over the world. Molina (’76 BA) was at a crossroads. Mexican oilcloth. But eventually Molina realized that the After graduating from UNM with a degree In the mid 1990s, the slick printed fabric Internet had changed commerce so in museum studies and working at the — a staple of cocinas in Mexico — wasn’t dramatically that she had to add an Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe and available in the United States. But Molina online retail store to her business plan. the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los and her friends loved it for how durable, “I said, ‘Cardie, if you want to keep Angeles, she had left the workplace to take washable and versatile it was. They could care of her three young children. put a piece under a baby’s high chair for easy your business, you’ve got to do this.’” Her retail operation offers an array of Now that the kids were off to elementary cleanup of spills, spice up kitchen cabinet tablecloths, placemats and aprons. school, Molina contemplated her future shelves or cover a dining room table. At 69, Molina is proud to have the and knew two things: She wanted to make “I would go to Mexico and buy some money, and that wasn’t going to happen if and my friends would always ask if I could same small corps of employees she she returned to the nonprofit art world. bring them a piece,” Molina says. “We loved started with and a company-sponsored “I said, ‘I’m going to start my own the color palette and the functionality of it. retirement plan. And despite interruptions in almost every business sector due to business,’” Molina recalls. One problem. And at that time it wasn’t available in the the COVID-19 pandemic, Molina’s “I had no background in business at all.” U.S. It was hard to find.” business has thrived. Restaurants and She read business books and enrolled in In 1995 she borrowed $5,000 from her cafeterias are looking for table coverings a 12-week women’s business development father and another $5,000 from a brotherthat can easily be disinfected with a class in Los Angeles. in-law, traveled to Mexico City and placed bleach solution and then reused, and Molina had no lack of ideas. her first order of oilcloth rolls from oilcloth fits the bill perfectly. Idea No. 1 anticipated spending by the aging a manufacturer. When she was studying art at UNM, Baby Boomers. “Gray Nation” would have been “When I started a lot of people were Molina (then Cardie Kremer) never a catalog for products to help aging people. skeptical,” Molina says. “Even my parents imagined she would run a business, Idea No. 2 married fast food and fair food. were like, ‘What? Cardie opening a Her “Baja Bean Cone” was a hard taco shell business?’ Because I was always a free spirit. and certainly never thought oilcloth formed in the shape of an ice cream cone Nobody expected me to be in business and would take over her life. and filled with beans, cheese and toppings. nobody really understood the product. But “But I’m sure glad it did,” she says. “I ended up loving business.” ❂ Thankfully for American restaurants, it was on trend and I knew it would be a home cooks and folk art aficionados, successful product.”
The Oilcloth Queen
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Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
Racial RECKONING AND CAREER CONNECTIONS New Alumni Association President Chad Cooper has a lot on his mind By Leslie Linthicum
T
his spring and summer have been especially tough for Chad Cooper (’01 MBA). A natural optimist, he has seen his sunny demeanor tested, first by the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic and then by the toxic drip of news of the killing of Black men and women by police and White vigilantes: Ahmaud Arbrey chased down and shot to death while jogging in Georgia; EMT Breonna Taylor killed by police in her own bed in Louisville; George Floyd suffocated by police during an arrest in Minneapolis. Cooper — a financial advisor and entrepreneur, a father, son and husband, a proud UNM graduate and incoming president of the UNM Alumni Association — was left exhausted and in anguish at the reminder that society could just as easily see him as a threat. He took the unusual step of sharing his pain and anger in a letter to all fellow alumni. As protests began to cascade across the country, Cooper wrote, “When I see
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George Floyd’s life being slowly taken, I see my life, my son’s life, my wife’s life, my daughter’s life, the lives of my mother, my father, my brother, my sisters, my family, my friends. All of these Black lives truly matter to me.” He asked the community to listen to one another, advocate for each other and fight for equality. And he added, “We must continue to be vigilant and outspoken against racism and inequality long after this news cycle ends.” Weeks later, sitting in his front yard with birdsong in the air and neighbors waving from their morning walks, Cooper said the response was quick and kind. “It’s been really, really good — really positive,” Cooper said. Cooper’s one-year term as Alumni Association president began in July. His goals for his term center around bringing Lobos together. “One goal is to encourage the involvement of more Albuquerque alums of all ages with the Albuquerque chapter,”
Cooper says. “The majority of our alums are here locally, and we’d really love to raise the profile of the Albuquerque chapter.” President-Elect Mike Silva will spearhead that initiative. Cooper’s other priority is to build a strong connection between alumni all over the world for career connections. The Alumni Career Initiative would build on the work being done by UNM’s Career Services, career mentoring initiatives in individual colleges and majors, and specialized events such as the annual STEM Boomerang. “The goal is to have a real network of UNM alumni around the country and the world to connect people for career development,” Cooper says. “We have different pockets with similar programs, but we want to build a strong system unifying the entire university.” The goal would be a website where job seekers — be they recent graduates or mid-career professionals — could search
for UNM alumni working in specific fields who have agreed to mentor or help network within their field. If an alum in the financial services sector was moving, say, to Washington, D.C., she could search the database by region and specialty and find willing Lobos to help her find a job. The idea is a natural for Cooper, who found at UNM’s Anderson School of Business mentors, job leads and his first business partner. “After graduation, it just seemed like I was always coming back to Anderson,” Cooper says. “There were so many people who helped me and guided me along.” Cooper was raised in New Orleans in a family with deep Louisiana roots. His mother and the stepfather who raised him after his parents divorced when he was young both worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His was a large family and close. “We spent a lot of time at church growing up,” he says, “and a lot of time in sports.” Cooper attended a private Episcopal high school in nearby Metairie, La., and began prepping for his eventual career as a financial advisor at a young age. “As a kid, I was definitely a saver and I knew the basics — saving and not spending more than you have,” he says. He dreamed of being a stockbroker but didn’t have firm college plans until a chance encounter at his parents’ wedding ceremony (after dating for years they officially got hitched in December of his senior year of high school). At the reception he met a college counselor from New England who took to Cooper. “He was really focused and passionate about sending Black kids to these East Coast boarding schools and colleges,” Cooper remembers. Through the connection, Cooper applied to and was accepted at Taft School in Watertown, Conn., where he would spend a year before college. “It’s one of those surreal places,” Cooper says. “If you take every stereotypical image of a hoity-toity New England boarding school, that is Taft. It was fantastic. I loved it.” Cooper stayed in New England for college, majoring in economics, sociology and anthropology at Middlebury College in Vermont.
He found his way to Albuquerque working as a defense contractor and started taking classes toward his MBA at night at Anderson. With classmate Brett Hills (’00 MBA), Cooper co-launched nmbars.com in 1999, a site to market downtown bars to customers. In 2002, his UNM connections led to a job at Rick Johnson & Company as director of interactive services. And in 2003, at the suggestion of fellow Alumni Association board member Amy Miller (’85 BA, ’93 MPA), he reached out to the hiring manager at Prudential where he found his current career advising individuals in investments and financial services. Cooper has stayed tied to UNM through speaking engagements and adjunct teaching and joined the Alumni Association finance committee in 2016 and the board of directors in 2018. It’s a strange and challenging year to be heading up the association, with stay-athome orders restricting the usual in-person mingling that is a staple of alumni events. Cooper is at home with his wife Melita, who he met four years ago, and their blended family, an 8-year-old daughter Melita brought to the marriage and a 16-year-old son from Cooper’s first marriage. “This year will be an interesting one because of the restrictions of the pandemic,” Cooper says. “But I’m really optimistic about what we can do.” ❂
• Cooper met his wife, Melita, when they were matched as partners for a 90-day fitness challenge at a kettlebell gym. Because their workout schedules didn’t align, they talked online and by phone but didn’t meet in person until weeks into the challenge when Cooper, intrigued, agreed to meet Melita at the gym for a 5 a.m. workout. • Cooper played high school football (linebacker) and baseball (short stop) and was captain of both teams. He played baseball at Middlebury College, was four-year starter at 2nd base, and he was a tri-captain his senior year. And he bats left. • He recently launched a cybersecurity firm with his father and another partner.
Danny Jarret (’89 BS, ’96 JD), Albuquerque, was featured as a Band 1 attorney in the Chambers USA 2020 Guide, a publication ranking the leading lawyers and law firms across the U.S. He is the office managing principal and litigation manager at the Albuquerque office of Jackson Lewis P.C. 1990s Wayne Johnson (’90 BUS), Albuquerque, was selected as the new Sandoval County manager. He has served in county government for more than 10 years and was most recently Torrance County’s manager. David A. Foeder (’93 BBA), Franklin, Tenn., was recently named to the new role of manager of service and parts curriculum development, dealer and field training for Nissan/INFINITI North America.
David A. Foeder
Levi Romero (’94 BAA, ’00 MARCH), Albuquerque, was chosen as New Mexico’s first poet laureate. He plans to start a podcast and an anthology of local poetry based on his travels and encounters. He has also taught in UNM’s Chicano and Chicana Studies Department. Christina Rivas Campos (’95 BA), Santa Rosa, N.M., was named co-chair of the Economic Recovery Council by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. As part of a 15-person team, Campos will be adding her expertise in health care administration and business to create plans to safely reopen businesses. Linda M. Vanzi (’95 JD), Albuquerque, has retired as New Mexico Court of Appeals Judge after serving on the bench for 16 years. First appointed to the Second Judicial District Court in 2004, Vanzi was appointed to the Court of Appeals four years later. Chris Pacheco (’96 JD), Rio Rancho, N.M., has been named chief executive officer at Titan Development. He has worked for the company for more than 20 years and for the last six served as the general counsel executive vice president.
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Shelf Life
Books by UNM Alumni
This Fleeting World (Cynthia Wooley, 2020) pairs poems written by
the life and times of Joseph Pulitzer, who left Hungary to set sail and join
Cynthia Wooley (’90 MA) with photographs she has taken. Words and
the U.S. Army and went on to transform daily newspapers in America and
pictures span the decades from 1984 to present and they are grounded
spearhead efforts to realize the dream of erecting Lady Liberty (commonly
in the landscape. “These poems live somewhere between poetry and
known as the Statue of Liberty) in New York’s harbor.
prose, as do I,” Wooley, who lives in Albuquerque, writes in her forward. An example: “Tonight the moon/ is the sound hole of a guitar/ and the tree’s raspy fingers/ play the song.” Images of Albuquerque ditch banks, billowing clouds and lonesome rail trestles accompany poems about travel, relationships, sickness and healing, love and loss.
Thinks A Lot, a Mimbres pueblo girl, is scolded for having her head in the clouds and, when she is put in charge of her younger cousins, for spending her days in play. Thinks A Lot Has Her Head in the Clouds (Sunstone Press, 2020) by twin sisters Carilyn Alarid (’93 BA, ’00 MA) and Marilyn Markel (’84 BUS) uses Mimbres culture to teach the lessons of fair play
John Lewis Taylor (’80 BA) explores the relationship between Navajos
and respect for the gifts and contributions of all community members in
and the United States military between 1868, when the Navajos returned
this, the fifth in a series of children’s books. Alarid, a docent at Coronado
to their homelands from their imprisonment at Fort Sumner, and the
Historic Site in Bernalillo, and Markel, the educational coordinator at
early decades of the 20th century in Navajo Scouts During the Apache
Mimbres Cultural Heritage Site in Mimbres, illustrate the book in the
Wars (The History Press, 2019). Filled with historical photos of Navajos
black and white classic Mimbres pottery tradition.
who signed on with the Army and vivid descriptions of raids and battles, the book concludes that joining forces with their former captors was a practical decision made by Navajo leaders to protect their lands and lessen conflicts between tribal members and Western settlers.
After Hours in Aztlan (Floricanto Press, 2019) by Rudy J. Miera (’79 BAED, ’93 MA), comes in the nick of time as quarantine wears on and humor seems in short supply. Similar in tone and sense of place to his early novel, The Fall and Rise of Champagne Sanchez, Aztlan follows
You don’t have to be a ghoul — or even much of a whiz in the kitchen
the adventures of UNM students Kiko de La O, Angelo Marquez and Luz
— to enjoy Cooking For Halflings & Monsters, Volume 2 (Multitudes
Valenzuela, who, drifting in their academics, commandeer the Daily Lobo
Press) by Astrid Tuttle Winegar (’00 BA, ’08 MA). Winegar’s degrees in
printing press and put out their own little underground newspaper calling
English and comparative literature are put to good use in the introductions
for a wage increase for campus workers. When the newspaper doesn’t
to recipes and the bibliography that cites sources as disparate as C.S. Lewis’
spark the revolution they were hoping for, the trio head to Old Mexico on
“The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,”
a caper to ignite justice in another way. Filled with local color and colorful
“Game of Thrones” and “Better Call Saul.” Winegar has fun cooking and
lingo, Aztlan perfectly evokes 1970s Albuquerque.
writing about food and life, but this is a serious cookbook devoted to soups and stews, with enough recipes to keep your bowl filled for a year. Some beautiful bread recipes are thrown in for accompaniment.
A story in Words Like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers (Wayne State University Press, 2020) begins like this: “I’m going to tell you a story that starts when I was a child. I don’t like to do that,
Saving Lady Liberty: Joseph Pulitzer’s Fight For The Statue of Liberty
because it lets people think that contemporary Indians are just an
(Calkins Creek, 2019) is the latest in a series of biographies of notable
adjunct to the past, that older Indian stuff is more cool than
Americans illustrated by Stacy Innerst (’80 BUS). Innerst, a painter and
contemporary Indian stuff, and that maybe we have no place in
illustrator, has illustrated children’s books about U.S. Supreme Court
this world other than as symbols of the past.” Lois Beardslee (’84 MA),
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Levi Strauss, Thomas Jefferson and The
an Ojibwe author puts that lie to rest in this collection of prose and
Beatles, to name a few. Now, with author Claudia Friddell, Innerst depicts
poems of contemporary Ojibwe life.
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Christopher George Perez (’96 JD) Bernalillo, N.M., was appointed to District Court judge in Sandoval County. He has worked as a private lawyer for more than two decades.
Revolution (Tara Lovato, 2020) by Tara Lovato, the pen name of Tara Trujillo (’99 BA), is a coming-of-age story of Elisa, a small-town girl from Taos who eats wild strawberries, roller skates orders to cars at Sonic and looks for more. She heads off to college at UNM and then travels around the world, but she always returns home to the stories of her Grandma Blanca, hot cakes and sausage and cool desert nights. In 1987, a young lawyer quit his government job in Santa Fe, flew to London, bought a Land Rover and headed south. In Travels in Africa: A Year By Land Rover Through The Great Continent (Respondeo Books, 2019), Fred Abramowitz (’82 JD) chronicles that trip, which took him from Morocco to Mali and across the continent to the Indian Ocean and Tanzania. Although Travels in Africa gives a reader a detailed view of towns, regions and geography, it is not a history or a travel guide. It is more a memoir of a single year in a man’s life as he visits the place he has been dreaming of since he was a child and discovers “the tragedy and wondrousness that is Africa.” The title of the latest book by Larry Hancock (’70 BAED) — In Denial: Secret Wars With Air Strikes And Tanks (Campania Partners, 2020) — stretches credulity. How could wars be fought with ground forces and air strikes and kept a secret? Hancock explores here covert military action that often is obvious and documented but can’t be officially traced to a government. It’s as old as the Cold War and as recent as, well, it’s hard to say. With chapters on the Bay of Pigs and Laos and Vietnam, Hancock explores the motivation and techniques of deniability of covert ops. Michael J. Pisani (’86 MBA, ’87 MA) is among the scholars who edited and contributed chapters to Advancing U.S. Latino Entrepreneurship (Purdue University Press, 2020), a thick collection of research on the growth of Latino-owned businesses and their contributions to the health of the U.S. economy. In one chapter, Pisani, a professor of business at Central Michigan University, takes a look at successful Latino entrepreneurs, including Albuquerquean Tom Chavez, and presents data that show the number of Latino-owned businesses soared from about a quarter million in the early 1980s to an estimated 5 million today. Still, fewer than 10 percent have employees. Pisani also finds that as Latinos become more acculturated, they become more entrepreneurial, concluding that the growing Latino-American population will play an important role in the growth of the U.S. economy.
ATTENTION PUBLISHED ALUMNI AUTHORS: We would like to add your book to the alumni library in Hodgin Hall and consider it for a review in Shelf Life. Please send an autographed copy to: Shelf Life, UNM Alumni Relations 1 UNM, MSC01-1160, Albuquerque, NM 87131
David Howes (’97 BUS, ’07 MA), Rio Rancho, N.M., was named UNM’s new linebacker coach. Previously Rio Rancho High School’s head football coach, Howes leaves the Rams with a 90-41 record over his 11-season tenure. Danny Gonzales (’99 BBA, ’02 MS), Albuquerque, was selected as UNM’s 32nd head football coach. A former UNM athlete and assistant coach, he has a five-year contract with UNM. Belinda Martinez (’99 BSEd), Los Lunas, N.M., is a member of the National Education Association New Mexico Hall of Fame. Now retired, the Belen Consolidated Schools teacher was inducted last year after 24 years of teaching gifted and special education students. Lyle Steely (’99 BAA), Phoenix, Ariz., was promoted to principal at SmithGroup. Steely, AIA, LEED AP, Designer, is a graduate of the School of Architecture & Planning. 2000s Jason Anderson (’01 MBA), Albuquerque, was named senior vice president of member experience at Nusenda Credit Union. In his new role at Nusenda, Anderson will be responsible for the oversight of the credit union’s Branch Network, Investment Services, Fraud and Facilities departments. Luis G. Carrasco (’01 BA), Los Lunas, N.M., a director at Rodey Law Firm, has been elected to the board of Opera Southwest.
Lyle Steely
Jason Anderson
Luis G. Carrasco
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UNM PEOPLE CHANGING WORLDS
INSPIRED BY A MOTHER’S SELFLESS LOVE Pavlakos Family Endows Scholarship at UNM College of Pharmacy By Irene Gray and Rose Romero
The Pavlakos family poses for a holiday photo, December 2018. Left to right: Dom Romero, Rose (Pavlakos) Romero, Bill Pavlakos, Vangie Pavlakos, Markella Pavlakos and Nectarios Pavlakos.
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uring the 2018 holiday season, a UNM College of Pharmacy alumna received a very special gift that will benefit others for years to come. Evangeline “Vangie” (Manole) Pavlakos (’79 BSPh) was surprised by her daughter,
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Dr. Rose (Pavlakos) Romero (’14 PharmD); son, Dr. Nectarios Pavlakos; son-in-law, Dom Romero, and daughterin-law, Markella Pavlakos, on Christmas morning with an endowment created in her name that is designed to honor her
commitment to the pharmacy profession and the College’s student pharmacists. As children, Rose and Nectarios witnessed firsthand Vangie’s devotion to her role as a pharmacist, mentor and educator. If a student was struggling, she
Diane J. Schmidt (’02 MA), Gallup, N.M., was honored with the Top of the Rockies award from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). Schmidt placed first in the column writing category. This is her fourth SPJ award. Shawn Ricketts (’02 MBA), Los Ranchos, N.M., was named chief financial officer at Affordable Solar.
consistently went beyond the call of duty by having them join her for family dinners, tutoring them, preparing them for interviews and helping them land their dream career. Vangie’s mentorship and dedication managed to convince her own daughter to pursue a career in pharmacy. Vangie has been a pharmacist for more than 40 years. She continues to practice at the top of her pharmacy license and gives back as a student mentor, patient advocate, dedicated supporter of the College and pharmacy leader in the community. Vangie’s career and service is indeed impressive, although what makes her story truly remarkable is how successful she and her husband, Dr. Bill Pavlakos, have been at instilling their shared values of service and hard work in their children. “Our mother has devoted her life and her career to helping others,” Rose said. “She is truly selfless and would do anything for someone in need. Her positive attitude, strong work ethic and genuine spirit are contagious, and her passion and drive are remarkable. When we reflect on all the sacrifices our mom has made to give everything she has to her family and friends, it truly brings us joy and has encouraged us to become the people we are today.” “Both of our parents have provided us with the tools to be successful in
our careers,” Nectarios said. “We are grateful for the path they paved for us, which is one that has challenged us not only to do our best but also to live our dreams. They’ve taught us to be kind and hardworking and to always help others in need. Creating this scholarship in our mother’s honor was an easy decision and one her kids are proud to provide in her name.” On their decision to honor Vangie with this generous gift, her children offered the following statement: “As UNM alumni, we are proud and grateful for the wonderful education, financial support and scholarships we were fortunate to receive. We truly believe that one of the best ways to give back is to honor our loving mother and share her dedication to pharmacy and patient care with others who possess a similar passion and drive.” Vangie’s children and their spouses intend that this gift in her name will keep her spirit of generosity alive for future generations while also making a difference at a university that the family holds dear to their hearts. ❂
If you’d like to contribute to the Evangeline Pavalkos Family Scholarship Endowment to benefit UNM College of Pharmacy students, you may do so by visiting www.unmfund.org/ evangeline-pavlakos
Wendy D. Bartlo (’03 BA), Champaign, Ill., was named the assistant director of Strategic Initiatives and Research Relations for the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Channell Segura (’03 BA, ’06 MA) was selected as the new superintendent for Truth or Consequences Municipal Schools. She previously held the title of assistant superintendent of Santa Fe Public Schools. Camelia A. Herrera (’04 MA), Mesilla Park, N.M., was Parkview Elementary’s nominee for the Socorro Consolidated School District Staff Member of the Year award. As a school counselor, Herrera manages students’ emotional needs, language testing and an anti-bullying program. Terri Nikole Baca (’05 BBA, ’08 JD), has been promoted to a new role managing legislative affairs for AT&T’s California team. Baca was previously president of the company’s operations in New Mexico. Lara M. Evans (’05 PhD), Santa Fe, N.M., was promoted to interim director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Research Center. Evans will also continue her work as professor and program director of the artist in residency program. Christopher C. Wilcox (’05 MS, ’09 PhD), Albuquerque, was recognized by The International Society for Optics and Photonics for his technical and scientific contributions to the optics community. Mary Earick (’06 PhD), Las Vegas, N.M., was selected to be the dean of the School of Education at New Mexico Highlands University. She has been the director for the Holmes Center for School Partnerships and Educator Preparation at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire since 2017.
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“The most useful and influential people in America are those who take the deepest interest in institutions that exist for the purpose of making the world better.” – Booker T. Washington
For more than 130 years, The University of New Mexico has made a difference in the lives of our students and our community. Our students are achieving their educational goals, taking their knowledge into the world, and making it a better place. Research conducted at UNM positively impacts faculty, students, and communities around the world. UNM is also providing top-tier care for patients across the state and region, helping care for those in times of need. None of this is possible without you. Your interest in UNM helps our students, researchers, and health care providers make a difference in New Mexico and around the world. Thank you for your support.
Visit unmfund.org to make a gift today.
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Good things happen when we work together.
We’re proud to partner with The University of New Mexico Alumni Association. To learn more libertymutual.com/nmalumni.
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Dear Fellow Alumni
E
ver since you graduated, a printed Mirage magazine has been available to you at least twice a year, with stories of interesting and accomplished alumni, news of the University, announcements of important life and career changes of your classmates and news of the deaths of classmates. The UNM Alumni Association mails out 145,000 copies of a 48-page Mirage twice a year. To be candid, the cost of printing such a substantial high-quality magazine and getting it to your mailboxes has risen year after year and it is a cost we sadly can no longer bear. We love Mirage and we know you do too. So, if you currently receive the print Mirage, you will continue to each
Fall. In the Spring, our print magazine will be released as an enhanced, interactive online version. The new Mirage website will contain all the same stories and photos as the online replica, plus some new storytelling approaches we hope will bring you even closer to and more engaged with your alma mater and alumni community. For many alumni, especially those of you who have already opted out of the print mailing for environmental reasons and chosen to receive our online replica Mirage, this won’t be much of a change. For others, especially those who value a paper magazine to hold and keep on the coffee table, we understand that we are changing a tradition and hope you
understand that we don’t take that lightly. We are committed to making the Spring online issue bigger, better and more engaging and hope that finding it in your inbox more than makes up for the print magazine not landing in your mail box. The Alumni Association is you. We’re in this together. The Alumni Association Board of Directors welcomes any of your questions or concerns. You may contact us at Alumni@unm.edu. Best regards and Go Lobos! Chad Cooper Board President
YOUR SPRING 2021 MIRAGE
IS DIGITAL
FOR THE SPRING 2021 ISSUE, WE’RE DEVELOPING A FULLY DIGITAL MIRAGE WITH EXCITING FEATURES AND INTERACTIVE CONTENT THAT IS CONVENIENTLY ACCESSIBLE FROM ANY CONNECTED DEVICE
WATCH | READ | LISTEN CHECK YOUR MIRAGE SUBSCRIPTION PREFERENCES AT UNMALUMNI.COM
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MIRAGE MAGAZINE
Letters continued TO THE EDITOR:
I
returned from Vietnam on July 20, 1969. For the previous 13 months, I had served as a radioman with the 3rd battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, operating mostly south of Da Nang. I earned my combat action ribbon, being shot at and returning fire to the “enemy.” My return was unmarked by any sort of recognition, by protesters or civilians, other than the stewardess asking my traveling companion “May I take your rifle, sir?” — referring to the bolt action Chinese rifle he had captured from the NVA and kept as a souvenir — which she stowed in the forward compartment until we got to Albuquerque. I got out of the Marines in December 1969, and by January of 1970 was a student at the University of New Mexico. My reception by my peers was mostly one of indifference, or pity. However, when the shootings at Kent State occurred, and our campus went on strike, I came to realize just how different I was from my fellow students. The morning after Kent State, I returned to campus to attend my freshman English class, wearing a black armband, and my “1st Marine Division — Vietnam” t-shirt. I remember thinking — “Jeez, I get back to the World thinking I’m out of danger and now I could get shot by my own people!” When I arrived on campus, protesters were walking in front of my building, promoting the strike. Another member of my class, also a veteran, came up beside me. We were both momentarily stunned. What should we do? I don’t remember talking to him, but I do remember thinking “I paid big time to earn the right to go to school — I’m going to school!” and we both crossed the picket line. It was no big deal to the protesters — nobody said anything to us or tried to stop us. When we got to our classroom, what a relief!, there were other students there, waiting for class to begin. We waited and we waited and we waited — nobody else showed up, including our instructor. We all got up to leave, and at that moment I looked around the room and realized that every single person there was a Vietnam veteran.
In the next moment, I realized how different I was from my peers. We could lose four guys in the first few seconds of a firefight, and those four names would be lost among the hundreds appearing that week. Four students are killed at Kent State, and the country goes nuts. Of course, I realized that those four deaths signified something different, but still it was a difficult pill to swallow. The most difficult thing I faced on returning to civilian life was indifference by the vast majority of the people with whom I had contact. I think we all want our deaths to have greater significance. The deaths of my comrades are waiting for their significance to be recognized. The highest recognition they could receive is for the people of this country to finally confront what they are asking us to do in their name, and to take responsibility for it.
Michael E. Toliver (’73 BS) Normal, Ill.
I
read this article with great interest but I think it’s full of left-wing bias. It would have been nice to hear from the other side. I was in my junior year at Los Alamos when the riots occurred but I don’t remember anything about the New Mexico National Guardsmen bayoneting anyone. I started my first semester at UNM in 1971 and I remember the police patrolling Central on foot and things being tense. There was more unrest that semester when Nixon mined Haiphong Harbor. I marched in a peaceful protest with some of my friends to the Carlisle Gate of the Air Force base. The march was ruined for me when I saw that there were people who were trying to start some violence walking with the crowd. They were five or six years older than the rest of us, clearly not students from UNM. They didn’t care if people were hurt; they were there to start a fight. Later I found out from an acquaintance of mine who was in the Air Force on the other side of the fence that they had loaded rifles and were under orders to fire on anyone going over the fence. Thankfully, this didn’t happen.
Neomi Gilmore (’06 BA), Gallup, N.M., has been confirmed by the Navajo Nation Council as a district court judge. Since 2017 she has worked at the Department of Justice, assisting the Nation’s 110 chapters and Administrative Service Centers. Ludivina O. Gurule (’06 BS, ’08 MOT), Roswell, N.M., owns Achieve Therapy Services, LLC, which was named a Star Business by the New Mexico Small Business Development Center Network. Heather Brislen (’07 MD), Albuquerque, was named governor of the New Mexico chapter of the American College of Physicians. She is a primary care physician at Lagom Health, and founder and CEO of Lagom Homes, a housing co-op for aging in place. Shammara Henderson (’07 JD), Albuquerque, was appointed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to fill a vacancy on the New Mexico Court of Appeals. She is the first African American to serve on the state appellate court. Tina Tsinigine (’07 JD), Window Rock, Ariz., was unanimously confirmed to the Navajo Nation Supreme Court. Her confirmation established an all-female high court. Katharine Winograd (’07 EdD), Albuquerque, the longest-serving president of Central New Mexico Community College before her retirement this year, Katharine Winograd was recognized as a 2019 Spirit Award winner. During her time as president, CNM significantly expanded the number of students and employees and increased its budget. Teresa Dovalpage (’08 PhD), Hobbs, N.M., was recognized by NBC News for her book, “Queen of Bones.” NBC named it one of its top 10 books by and about Latinos in 2019. The book is a murder mystery set in Albuquerque and Havana.
Steven Bingham (’75 BA) Colorado Springs, Colo.
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Connect! Communicate! Meet up with old friends and make new Ones! FIND YOUR CHAPTER
CONSTITUENCY CHAPTERS
The UNM Alumni Association’s regional chapter program provides opportunities for alumni to stay connected with the University, find other UNM alumni living in their area and give back to the University and their communities. Find your chapter, upcoming chapter events and your chapter’s social media pages by visiting UNMAlumni.com/chapters.
Black Alumni Chapter
REGIONAL CHAPTERS
Native American Chapter
Georgia Chapter
School of Architecture & Planning Chapter
New York Chapter
Veteran’s Chapter
Washington, D.C. Chapter
Young Alumni Chapter
Chicago Chapter
CONSTITUENCY GROUPS
Denver Chapter
Daily Lobo
Albuquerque Area Chapter
Trailblazers
Las Vegas Chapter
College of Education & Human Sciences Chapter Geography Chapter Honors Alumni Chapter Latin@Hispan@ Chapter
Reno Area Chapter
UNM ALUMNI PROGRAMMING & EVENTS
Salt Lake City Chapter
Lobo Living Room
Austin Chapter
The UNM Alumni Vodcast
Dallas/Fort Worth Chapter
Green Chile Roast — By Post
Houston Chapter Phoenix Chapter Los Angeles Chapter Norcal Chapter San Diego Chapter Seattle Chapter
Find more information about UNM Alumni Programming and Events at UNMAlumni.com.
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MIRAGE MAGAZINE
From the Veep
S
ince my last Mirage letter, Lobos, we’ve all been faced with tumultuous and difficult times. From a worldwide pandemic to racial tensions, to uncertainty for students at every level of education, it’s been a time of adaptations and challenges, and a test of our strength and resiliency.
While we may not have predicted this time in history, it has presented us with the opportunity to become “Connected by the Unexpected,” the apt slogan chosen for this year’s Homecoming theme. Your Alumni Association has been working full force to create new and innovative ways for us Connie Beimer to maintain and grow our special connection as Lobos, like transitioning events such as the Lobo Living Room to an online format, and making annual Green Chile Roasts a “Roast by Post,” with all-online green chile and merchandise sales benefiting our regional chapter scholarship funds. We have expanded our programming lineup to include a vodcast with Alumni Association President Chad Cooper and President-Elect Mike Silva, tackling some of the more controversial issues and their impact on higher education. We’ve also continued our Lobo Love campaign, supporting alumni businesses and promoting resources our Pack may need during these times. Also, on the horizon is an extensive career initiative designed to connect UNM students, recent graduates and all alumni with worldwide networking and career-seeking opportunities. We’re very excited for this new initiative and will be sharing more information as the program develops. Lobos, your Alumni Association has chosen to meet the circumstances of 2020 with creativity, compassion and perseverance. We know that the year ahead will not look like years past, but we are in this experience together — Connected by the Unexpected. We hope you will join us in our virtual events and initiatives, knowing that each and every one of us will be even more grateful when we are able to gather again in person. Stay healthy, stay strong — and GO LOBOS!
Let’s connect -
Karly LeAnna (’08 BSED), Los Lunas, N.M., was nominated by Midway Elementary for the Socorro Consolidated School District Teacher of the Year award. With more than 13 years of experience, LeAnna is known for her dedication to child development and cultivating a love of learning in her kindergarteners’ hearts. Zach Arnett (‘09 BA), is the defensive coordinator for Mississippi State University's football program. Rachel Balkovec (’09 BS), Tampa, Fla., became the first woman hired by a major league organization as a hitting coach. The former UNM softball player was hired by the New York Yankees in November 2019 and will join the rookie league Gulf Coast Yankees in Tampa, Fla., as their full-time hitting coach. Emily M. Gaffney (’09 MBA), Albuquerque, was named one of New Mexico’s “40 Under Forty,” by Albuquerque Business First, a recognition of outstanding young professionals making impacts in their industries and state. Serving Sandia National Laboratories since 2012, Gaffney is currently the senior manager for Sandia’s Laboratory Operating System. Christina M. Looney (’09 BBA, ’13 JD), Albuquerque, was elected as the newest shareholder of the Sutin, Thayer and Browne law firm. Adam G. Rankin (’09 JD), Santa Fe, N.M., has become partner of the Denver law firm Holland & Hart LLP. 2010s Heather R. Benavidez (’10 BA, ’19 MPA), Belen, N.M., ended her tenure as Rio Communities municipal judge and has been appointed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to serve as Magistrate Court judge in Los Lunas.
Henry Jake Foreman (’10 BUS, ’15 MCRP), Albuquerque, is the recipient of the third Financial Education Innovator Award given Connie Beimer by the Nusenda Credit Union Foundation. Interim Vice President for Alumni Relations He is the founder of the Karuna Colectiva, an indigenous youth collective and mentorship program.
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Alumni Network Snapshots from Alumni events
Chris Lujan (’05 BAA), Nate Molinar (’03 BBA), Victoria Lujan (’11 BA), Alexis Kerschner Tappan (’99 BA, ’17 MA) and Katie Varoz Williams (’04 BA) at the Mountain West Tournament in Las Vegas.
2020 Winter Awards Recipients, Kathie Winograd (’07 EdD), C. Frank Bennett (’80 BSPh), Enrique Lamadrid (’70 BA), and George Bach (’02 JD), with University of New Mexico President Garnett S. Stokes.
Jacob Wellman (’13 BA), Heidi Overton (’15 MD), Cate Wisdom (’11 BSCHE) and Connie Beimer (’77 BA, ’78 MPA) at the Capitol Hill Congressional Reception in March.
Joseph Baca (’60 BAEd), Jim Hulsman (’59 BS, BSPE), Mary Lois Hulsman (’62 MSEd, ’71 MA) and Dorothy Baca (’66 BSEd, ’90 MA) at the 2020 Winter Awards Reception in February.
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Lobos gather for the Washington, D.C., Chapter basketball watch party.
Happy alumni at the New York Chapter basketball watch party.
In Memoriam We remember alumni who recently passed away.
1940 - 1949 Helen Janeway Hammond, ’43 Leola K. Peed, ’43 Paul Arnold Feil, ’44 Dorothy A. Williams, ’46 Elsie Carolyn Bell, ’47 Judith Gresser Handelman, ’47 Jack W. Harris, ’47 Suzanne Hodgman, ’47 Aileen H. Owerko, ’47 Marjorie H. Babcock, ’48 Edward C. Beaumont, ’48 Angelina J. Chavez, ’48 Norma L. Dolle, ’48 Joan Taul Farris, ’48 Dean Leon Thomas, ’48 James Lee Dossey, ’49, ’51 Tess K. Reis, ’49 Keith M. Rucker, ’49 Albert Lee Stovall, ’49 Gale M. Waddell, ’49 1950 - 1959 Donna V. Brown, ’50 Melvin Cordova, ’50 Marshall E. Farris, ’50, ’52 Margaret E. Marchiondo, ’50 Dorris Lorraine Mitchell, ’50 Robert A. Murray, ’50 Charles S. Nesting, ’50 Shirley L. Scanlon, ’50 Ralph A. Shubert, ’50 Edward D. Stoeckert, ’50 Mary Margaret Zieglar, ’50 Terry Berman, ’51 Frederick J. Disque, ’51 Arthur Friedman, ’51 Beverly Tommene Gohl, ’51 Jack S. Oda, ’51 Joyce S. Rhodes, ’51 Robert Warren Stark, ’51 William H. Bell, ’52 Margaret Halley Bender, ’52 Pablo Chavez, ’52
Joan Anderson Cornell, ’52 John G. Kuhn, ’52 Marvin Rex Ramsower, ’52 James E. Warne, ’52, ’57 Earl E. Weaver, ’52 Albert P. Weiner, ’52 Kay Cannon, ’53 Helen Louise Disque, ’53 Bill Gentry, ’53, ’59 Jack Wayne Goodner, ’53, ’57, ’61 Everett Jay Jones, ’53 Phillip F. Maloof, ’53 Bernard E. Carbajal, ’54 Ronald J. Manzi, ’54 Kathleen Patricia Springer, ’54 Hank O. Ash, ’55, ’58 Nancy L. Barfield, ’55 Louis B. Hilderbrand, ’55 Robert William Hougland, ’55 Alvin D. Parker, ’55 Joseph L. Armijo, ’56 H. Darden Chambliss, ’56 Roger L. Copple, ’56 David F. Hiatt, ’56, ’60 Vernon R. King, ’56 Peggy Lou Kirkland, ’56, ’62 Bill R. Moreland, ’56 Marc Prelo, ’56, ’66 Ann Rose, ’56 Frederick Edwin Sallade, ’56 James H. Turner, ’56 Lucy Anne Woods, ’56, ’82 Paul A. Catacosinos, ’57, ’62 Paul Olaf Scheie, ’57 Charles Manley Allen, ’58 Marvin Edward Goff, ’58 Barbara Jean Holt. ’58 Anna P. Machemehl, ’58 Arthur B. Merkle, ’58, ’61 Andrew M. Torres, ’58 Frank A. Valdes, ’58, ’61 Dimitrios A. Pappas, ’59 Mary Virginia Schwind, ’59
Bernadette S. Gallegos (’11 BBA, ’13 MBA), Albuquerque, was named one of New Mexico’s “40 Under Forty,” by Albuquerque Business First, a recognition of outstanding young professionals making impacts in their industries and state. Beginning at Sandia National Laboratories as an intern in 2011, Gallegos is currently the manager of Project Management. Julia M. Ellis (’12 BA), Albuquerque, was promoted to marketing manager for H.B. Construction. In her new role, she will be contributing to the company’s growth and strategic direction while overseeing communication and marketing programs. Casey Holland (’12 BA), Albuquerque, is the recipient of the Young Farmer of the Year Award. She was recognized for managing Chispas Farm, where more than 120 varieties of fruits and vegetables are grown. Jonathan T. Ragsdale (’12 BA), Albuquerque, will be touring with the cast and crew of “Finding Neverland,” an acclaimed musical. Ryan M. Baltunis (’13 AA, ’13 BS, ’17 MA), Albuquerque, was named to The Association for Talent Development of New Mexico. Baltunis is the vice president of technology at Sandia National Laboratories. Matthew Eaton (’14 MA), Albuquerque, was named the 2019-2020 American Indian College Fund Faculty of the Year by the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he is an assistant professor of studio arts and sculpture. Alex R. Kirk (’14 BBA), Rio Rancho, N.M., has signed to play the 2020-21 season with the Alvark Tokyo team of the Japanese Basketball League. Kirk averages 18.2 points and 9.9 rebounds per game. Matthew Jake Skeets (’14 BA), Chinle, Ariz., is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award, designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent. Skeets will receive a $50,000 prize.
Matthew Jake Skeets
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In Memoriam 1960 - 1969 Charles F. Edgemon, ’60 Ralph E. Fowble, ’60 Walter W. Joseph, ’60, ’65 Allen C. Lockhart, ’60 Karen Quelle McKinnon, ’60, ’77 John C. McPhaul, ’60 Izzy H. Nelson, ’60 Ferrell Thomas O’Rourke, ’60 Fred J. Bachicha, ’61, ’67 William E. Bosken, ’61 Richard D. Dill, ’61 Robert W. Larson, ’61 Henry Eugene Bradley, ’62 Warren Bruce, ’62 Mary Dodson, ’62 Joseph O. Dryer, ’62 Yum Kee Fu, ’62 Cynthia Gaunt Hanna, ’62 Cherril Snow Lloyd, ’62 Raymona J. McAdams, ’62 Bernard Paul Metzgar, ’62 Terry Jane Ritchie, ’62 Samuel Russo, ’62 Margaret E. Swain, ’62 Roger L. Woodle, ’62 Esther Virginia Zendt, ’62 Rudolfo A. Anaya, ’63, ’69, ’72 Peter DiGangi, ’63, ’80 Claude T. Dowell, ’63 Theodore R. Frisbie, ’63, ’67 Earl T. Herzog, ’63 Robert E. Nunn, ’63 Steven B. Brown, ’64 Margaret Doherty Chandler, ’64 Andrew James Demes, ’64 Glenda Edwards, ’64, ’69 Gretchen Fox, ’64 Paul Jude Johnson, ’64 David Bernard Blake, ’65 Richard L. Burton, ’65 Robert J. Dyer, ’65 Orvey E. Hampton, ’65 Diane Katherine Lujan, ’65, ’83
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Lee Mairs, ’65 Mary Doyle Missakian, ’65 Ramona J. Morris, ’65 David M. Niese, ’65 James Robert Parker, ’65 William E. Thompson, ’65 Guy B. Wimberly, ’65 Carl D. Butts, ’66 DeBow Freed, ’66 Arthur S. Tarro, ’66 Eliot Glassheim, ’67 Charlene Krummel, ’67 James M. McAdams, ’67, ’69 Thomas L. Morin, ’67 Eric J. C. Dietrich-Berryman, ’68, ’71 Allegra J. Hanson, ’68 Dorothy A. Herry, ’68, ’72 Joe S. Keith, ’68 Marjorie McGarrah, ’68 Ronald Anthony Nespeca, ’68 William Hickman Pickens, ’68, ’71 Dennis L. Salo, ’68 Sylvia Jean Sisson, ’68 Bill R. Ticer, ’68, ’71 Jeffrey L. Williams, ’68, ’05 John C. J. Wirth, ’68, ’94 Joseph W. Collins, ’69 Suzanne U. Magill, ’69 Abigail Henriette McVeety, ’69 Rose M. Montoya, ’69 Jack D. Ward, ’69 1970 - 1979 James D. Griffin, ’70 Adelaide S. McDowell, ’70, ’71, ’89 William Robert Merz, ’70 Cassondra J. Moran, ’70 Donna L. Bullock, ’71, ’75 Ernest H. Gilbert, ’71 William Lewis Hibbs, ’71 Kathryn Ann Krahling, ’71, ’80 Oliver L. Marianetti, ’71 Maria Lourdes Marquez Andler ‘71 Tomas Octaviano Martinez, ’71 Diane Judith Slack, ’71, ’78
Jose Antonio Soler, ’71 Gary Vance Stone, ’71 James Tomchee, ’71 Andrew Viera, ’71 Nina Baca Serna, ’72 Bruce Joseph Bronson, ’72, ’87 Patrick G. Calhoun, ’72 Randolph Edmonds, ’72 Robert J. Herrera, ’72 Paula Z. Dougherty, ’73 Gary Lee Dushane, ’73, ’76 Lourdes Irene Elias, ’73 Julie Cullender Gutierrez, '73, '93 Donald B. Hall, ’73 Lottie Jane Horn, ’73 Emmanuel Anthony Lopez, ’73 Alice F. Sandoval, ’73 Mary Anne Beahm, ’74 Hank Henry Lewis, ’74, ’81 Richard Larry Orrison, ’74 James Allen Spencer, ’74 Richard William Tavelli, ’74 Molly Elene Cunningham, ’75 Kitty Ann Ellis, ’75 Margaret S. Gall, ’75 Kathleen Lobaugh Gavey, ’75, ’78 George Stephen Lauer, ’75 Carmen J. Pennington, ’75, ’81 Oma E. S. Sandoval, ’75 Stephen Edward Saueressig, ’75 Searle W. Woods, ’75 Stephanie B. Yund, ’75 Shirley C. Ferron, ’76 Marcia Brown Lincoln, ’76 Joseph M. Pistono, ’76 Barbara S. Rosen, ’76 Chris Columbus Sanguinetti, ’76 Doris Pauline Bromberg, ’77 Robert Joseph Kandrotas, ’77, ’81 Sylvia Lucero Pacheco, ’77 James William Taylor, ’77 Jeffery Harper Cottam, ’78 Sharon Hughey Feldman, ’78 Gordon Allen Hall, ’78 James Ervin Malloch, ’78, ’81
In Memoriam Sara Beth McComas, ’78 Eleanor Louise Mitchell, ’78 Charlotte Anne Notgrass, ’78 John Phillip Putnam, ’78 Patricia Rae Curtin, ’79 Stephan A. Fagerquist, ’79 Hector C. Portillo, ’79 1980 - 1989 Lloyd Bert Garcia, ’80 William Howard, ’80 Lois Harrison Jennings, ’80 Patsy Jan McClendon, ’80 Steve G. Schiewe, ’80 Carol Jean Singleton, ’80 Robert Henry George Tully, ’80, ’84 Tommy F. Arviso, ’81 Stephen Robert Farris, ’81, ’90 David Gregory Healow, ’81 Emelina D. Pacheco, ’81 Loretta Karen Raff, ’81 Darryl Bruce Faulkner, ’82 Jacqueline Leigh Harris, ’82 Francis Moises Selph, ’82 Gloria A. Sotelo, ’82 Margaret McCarthy, ’83 Marie Pino, ’83, ’98 George Enriquez Zamora, ’83 John Allan Englekirk ‘84 Robert William Mayhew, ’84 Mary Eva Rhoads, ’84
Jennifer Sue Scarbrough, ’84 Peter Christopher Burke, ’85, ’88 Joyce Ann Carden, ’85 Carol Settevig Miller, ’85 Harold Glen Funck, ’86 Sandra Eileen Rotruck, ’86 Georgene M. Swenson, ’87 Thad Evan Brown, ’88, ’90 Abby Rose Martinez, ’88 Stephanie Lyn Trower, ’88 Kenneth John Valovcin, ’88 Melissa Judith West, ’88 J. David Harrell, ’89 Brian Dean Marsh, ’89 1990 - 1999 Ramona Hootner Caplan, ’90, ’93 Pierce Tanquary Ford, ’90 Brenda Ruth Gallegos-Montoya, ’90, ’92 Joe Shield Wallace, ’90 John Joseph Zahl, ’90 Dennis Scott Hazlett, ’91 Linda Sue Klinga, ’91 Gina Tezel Mensay, ’91 Melvina Murphy, ’91, ’97, ’09 Rebecca Elizabeth Wenk, ’91 Harriet Nez John, ’92 Susan Jane Strelitz, ’92 Robert Michael Rodriguez, ’93 Kristine Willingham, ’94 Eleanor Jean Marek, ’95
Hailey Johnson (’16 BBA), Albuquerque, joined New Mexico Mutual as their marketing specialist. Lucas Pedraza (’16 MCRP), Albuquerque, has been promoted to MainStreet Project coordinator with the New Mexico Economic Development Department. He previously managed the small business office in the City of Albuquerque’s Economic Development Department. Chance M. Greengrass (’17 BS, ’20 MPA), Roswell, N.M., has graduated with a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps. He has been recognized as a Distinguished Military Graduate, and received the Military Science IV Saber Award and Reserve Officer Association Award. Charles Hinson (’18 MBA), Albuquerque, was named to The Association for Talent Development of New Mexico. Hinson is the vice president of operations and finance at UNM Hospital. Jose Juarez, Jr. (’18 BSME), Katy, Texas, joined DNV GL Energy Services USA, where he works as a member of the PNM Business Energy Efficiency Programs' engineering team and is the Advanced ACTuneup Program Administrator. Mostafa Peysokhan (’18 MS), Albuquerque, has created an inexpensive ventilator design that is easily assembled with minimal equipment. Peysokhan released the free design online to help hospitals experiencing ventilator shortages. Esmeralda Arreguin-Martinez (’19 BSCHE) Albuquerque, earned a National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellowship, awarded to students with a desire to pursue research in graduate school.
Have a Good Howl Our monthly email newsletter, The Howler, keeps Lobos up-to-date with Alumni Association news and events, as well as additional alumni profiles not published in Mirage. You can read it online at UNMAlumni.com/howler or subscribe to the email version by sending a request to alumni@unm.edu.
Kenny Thomas (’19 BA), Sacramento, Calif., received his college degree in liberal arts from UNM. After attending UNM in the 1990s, where he scored 1,931 points and grabbed 1,032 rebounds, Thomas went on to play for the NBA in Houston, Philadelphia and Sacramento. Jacquelyn A. Turcich (’11 BS), Albuquerque, was named general manager and human resources director of Lavu Inc. She joined Lavu in 2018.
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In Memoriam Lynne B. Schmolke, ’95 Calvin William Allen, ’96 Matthew Kevin Brinkley, ’96 Natalie Anne Gallegos, ’96 Sherron Jane Knoop, ’96 Lorita Ellen Veazey, ’96 Burt Wilson, ’96 Charles Albert Zdravesky, ’96 Barbara Anne Abercrombie, ’97 Roy Lee Oldperson, ’97 Susan Caryl Clair, ’98, ’07 Elizabeth Jean Evans, ’98 Serafina Fellin, ’98 James Richard Ramo McGehee, ’98 Urszula Jolanta Biela, ’99 John Edward Hendee, ’99
Brendan Alexander Reser, ’00 Fannie B. Sam, ’00 Jacob Alan Wishard, ’00, ’03 Marlena Irene Dixon, ’01, ’05 Raymond C. Pino, ’01 James C. Martinez, ’02 Edward A. Kennedy, ’03 Jose M. Perea, ’03 Melissa B. Johnson, ’06 Keith Alan Marks, ’06 Stacie N. Cruz, ’07, ’13 Katherine W. Nilssen, ’07 Melissa L. Vargas, ’07 Michelle Elizabeth Canaday, ’08 Brucella K. Aldridge, ’09
2000 - 2009
Samuel Ialous Glover, ’10 Alicia M. Hicks, ’10 Mark Steven Martinez, ’14
Fred Griego, ’00 Timothy David Lundin, ’00
2010 - 2019
Max Jean Van Huysse, ’14 Cassandra Mae Garcia, ’17 Robert William Sadler, ’18 Anna Lee Kirkbride-Judah, ’19 OTHER ALUMNI Kathryn Diane Manuelito FACULTY AND STAFF Ramona Caplan Rafaelita Romero Garcia Thomas Franklin Lindsey Lydia Rede Madrid Anne Lee Madsen Janet Roebuck Barbara Sue Rosen Claude Marie Senninger
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My
ALUMNI STORY
I was born and raised in Albuquerque, and like most high schoolers, I dreamed of attending school out of state. When I was awarded the Presidential Scholarship to attend UNM, I decided to stay in my hometown and be a Lobo — and let me tell you, this was the best decision of my life. My undergraduate story at UNM is special. I was involved in student government, Greek life and student philanthropies. I was inspired by professors at the Anderson School of Management and represented the school on two different award-winning marketing campaigns. I was given opportunities inside and out of the classroom to learn, grow and succeed. In May of 2017, I walked across the commencement stage and I was ready to take on the world.
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However, UNM couldn’t keep me away for long. In March of 2018, I came back to UNM to work as a staff member at the Anderson School in Alumni Relations. This role gave me an opportunity to meet and learn from some of UNM’s best alumni. UNM’s alumni community is very special, and I am happy to be a part of it. As I held this role, I continued my studies by pursuing a graduate degree from the School of Public Administration and received my master’s in 2019. Nowadays, I work in external affairs for Comcast, and I use skills and lessons that I learned at UNM every day. The University gave me a chance to learn about and truly become myself. Because of this, I look for every opportunity to give back. As I join the Alumni Association Board of Directors this year, I hope to continue to create positive change for students and alumni now, and in the future. I am a Lobo for life, and I am proud of it. Kyle Biederwolf (’17 BBA, ’19 MPA)
Stay in touch with your Alumni Association at UNMAlumni.com. Click on “Connect.”
FALL 2020
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M A G A Z I N E
The University of New Mexico Alumni Association MSC 01-1160 1 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001
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