Mirage Spring 2021

SPRING 2021

M A G A Z I N E THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO I ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Action!

TV and movie art director Steven Maes (’00 BUS) directs his first feature film

Contents 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 SIRI? ALEXA? ARE YOU SPEAKING MY LANGUAGE? Alumna Davar Ardalan (’93 BA) works toward culturally relevant AI

By Steve Neumann

14 CHANGING DIABETES DIAGNOSES Alumnus Simon Barriga uses artificial intelligence to find complications earlier

By Leslie Linthicum

18 DESIGNING WORLDS

Alumnus Steven Maes (’00 BUS)

creates graphics for movies and TV shows

By Leslie Linthicum

22 FACE MASKS, PIVOTS AND ZOOM How UNM adapted to the oddest

of academic years

By Leslie Linthicum

28 WIPING OUT SARS-COV-2 UNM team invents antimicrobial polymers that neutralize the coronavirus

By Leslie Linthicum

30 A CAREER IN FLIGHT Test engineer Thomas Gray (’61 BSEE)

helped Boeing aircraft fly right

By Amanda Gardner

32 BREAKING BOUNDARIES A scholarship for students with disabilities honors courageous UNM alumna

By Hilary Mayall Jetty

Davar Ardalan (’93 BA). Photo: IVOW AI

On the cover: Steven Maes (’00 BUS) combined his love of road racing with his movie career to produce his first feature film.

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

34 SHELF LIFE

41 FROM THE VEEP

Spring 2021, Volume 41, Number 1

Books by UNM alumni

A message from Alumni Association’s Connie Beimer

The University of New Mexico

36 MESSAGE FROM YOUR PRESIDENT 39 ALUMNI CALENDAR

40 HONORING ALUMNI

Meet 2020’s Trailblazers

42 ALUMNI NETWORK

Snapshots from Alumni events

43 IN MEMORIAM 47 MY ALUMNI STORY It’s Griff Lamar (’17 BBA)

Garnett S. Stokes, President Connie Beimer, InterimVice President, Alumni Relations, Executive Director Alumni Association UNM Alumni Association Executive Committee 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 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.

Web: UNMAlumni.com Facebook: Facebook.com/UNMAlumni Instagram: Instagram.com/UNMAlumni

Freshman Jaanai Giselle Martinez Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

Flickr: Flickr.com/UNMAlumni Twitter: @UNMAlumni

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Good things happen when we work together.

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Coverage provided and underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company or its subsidiaries or affiliates, 175 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Equal Housing Insurer. ©2019 Liberty Mutual Insurance 12564942

Letters to the editor FROM THE EDITOR:

H

as it only been six months since we published the last issue of Mirage?

In the Year of Coronavirus, sometimes time stands still and a day spent in self-isolation can feel like a week. Other times, I look at the calendar and marvel that we’ve been at this for six months, nine months, a year.

I distinctly remember my birthday a year ago in March, mostly because it was completely ignored in what was then a new and rather intriguing shutdown.

Could we do this for a few weeks?

Stay home? Not see other people? Rely on the Internet for work, shopping, even happy hour?

We could. And we did. As the oneyear anniversary of this weirdness rolls around, we’re still doing it and I prepare to ring in another birthday at home with my husband, our pandemic puppy and DoorDash.

At UNM, the summer was spent preparing for an academic year like no other. With no crystal ball to know what late August would look and feel like, administrators made their best guess that close physical contact would still be unsafe and faculty began to steep themselves in best practices for teaching remotely.

Students, staff and faculty who only knew FaceTime a year ago became quick studies in the uses of Zoom and other platforms and in the differences between hybrid in-person, synchronous and asynchronous schedules.

In addition to profiles of some especially inspiring alumni in this issue, I’ll introduce you to some students and faculty members who adapted to — and in some cases thrived — in this new academic world.

And what better time to launch Mirage in a virtual-only format?

This is the first issue that we are publishing online only. That means you will not receive this in printed form in the mail but can read the print facsimile on the e-reader you’re most comfortable using — swiping to turn pages and accessing the magazine in its familiar form.

On the web, our storytelling includes a new video component so that you may see and hear fellow alumni to better understand their worlds.

It’s all been a little more challenging under pandemic procedures and we have juggled the twin goals of bringing you a magazine in a new format while also keeping everyone healthy. Almost all of our interactions have been remote. If they have been in person, we have followed UNM and New Mexico guidelines for distancing and wearing masks. When you see photos or videos of people without masks on, I promise you those instances were brief and everyone was at a safe distance.

We’d very much like to hear your thoughts on the new website. You can email me at MirageEditor@unm.edu or alumni@unm.edu.

Stay safe and thanks for reading!

Leslie Linthicum MirageEditor@unm.edu

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, 87131-0001.

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 1950s Frances R. Spallina (’56), Albuquerque, and Col. Marvin Spallina celebrated their 65th wedding anniversay. They were married Feb. 14, 1955, at the Thomas Aquinas Newman Center at UNM. 1960s Susan Seligman Kennedy (’60 BA) and Jack Kennedy (’61 BS), Albuquerque, celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. They are high school sweethearts, married Aug. 19, 1960, at the Albuquerque Country Club.

Judy Vaughan (’69 MD), Albuquerque, has published her biography, “Strawberry Roan: Growing in the Shadow of Hermit’s Peak.”

E. Marshall Wilder (’64 BSEE) has published “The Microchip Revolution: A Brief History.”

1970s Rhonda Lynn Ashcraft (’79 BBA), Albuquerque, owner of Articles for Her, has announced she will be retiring and closing her store, a fixture in the Northeast Heights for 40 years.

Sarah A. Bird (’78 BA), Austin, Texas, received the Paul Ré Peace Prize in the general category for her work as an activist for libraries and literacy programs. Her other works include the novel, “The Flamenco Academy.”

Robert M. Calvani (’71 BAFA), Albuquerque, has been elected president of the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards for 2020 - 21. Among his career achievements are his designs for the First Judicial District courthouse and the New Mexico History Museum.

Charles Burdick Ewing (’76 BBA), Albuquerque, was appointed to a three-year term on the board of directors of The Parker Center for Family Business. He brings 40 years of banking experience to the board.

Augusta P. Farley (’74 MA), Patterson, Calif., was named one of 2020’s Outstanding Women of Stanislaus County. Farley was selected for her outstanding work in supporting women and children in the community.

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The Anaya Legacy at UNM “I will live as long as you remember me.

I live in your memory.”

– Rudolfo Anaya, The Old Man’s Love Story

Rudolfo Anaya (B.A. ’63, M.A. ’68, M.A. ‘72), beloved author of Bless Me, Ultima, brought to life the Chicano experience in the American Southwest.

Founder of UNM’s Creative Writing Program, the award-winning writer and professor inspired students for two decades. Patricia Anaya (B.A. ’59, M.A. ‘73), Rudolfo’s wife, enjoyed a career teaching literature and counseling students at Albuquerque Public Schools. Patricia also served as Rudolfo’s trusted editor and supporter through each article, story, and book. Patricia passed away January 5, 2010.

Rudolfo Anaya

Oct. 30, 1937 – June 28, 2020

During their lives, the Anayas touched countless souls. Forever gracious, they extended their influence with a substantial estate gift to UNM. On behalf of the University of New Mexico and citizens of the world, the UNM Foundation expresses our gratitude to Rudolfo and Patricia for entrusting us with this powerful legacy.

The Anayas’ legacy gift supports The Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture on the Literature of the Southwest, The Rudolfo Anaya Fellowship, The Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Scholarship Fund, NM PBS and Carrie Tingley Children’s Hospital. Their generosity also supports the Rudolfo Anaya Archive at the Center for Southwest Research: a collection of his books, manuscripts, and letters. In a true gesture of lasting importance, the Anayas donated the copyright and royalty interests from his writings to UNM, which will support The Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Scholarship Fund.

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

Hard work and adaptation keys to UNM’s 2020 success

A

s I write this in late December 2020, the first doses of a vaccine for COVID-19 are being administered to our front-line health care providers at The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center who have been working tirelessly and fearlessly. I’m in awe of their dedication, and so grateful for their skill and compassion. To all of them, and all of our alumni on the front lines of the pandemic: thank you. We’re proud to be your fellow Lobos.

I also want to applaud a different kind of frontline worker vital to our core mission at UNM: our faculty, who quickly and deftly pivoted to life under lockdown. Whether they were teaching chemistry or Kafka, our faculty masterfully adapted to a new normal of remote instruction and squint-sized Zoom windows. That also meant holding virtual office hours and conducting research remotely, while still juggling family life from the dining room table. While nothing compares to face-to-face instruction, our faculty have also proved that nothing gets in the way of a great teacher.

Meanwhile, our dedicated staff continued the work that kept The University of New Mexico open for business, from our fantastic custodial staff to our masterful librarians and laboratory workers. Many employees, in fact, were on campus every day, keeping our most vital functions safely operating even at the height of the pandemic. To our faculty and our staff, I can’t begin to tell you how thankful I am for all of you.

And let’s hear it for the unsung heroes of 2020: each and every one of our students. They’ve had their lives as Lobos unexpectedly and permanently altered. And while we can empathize with all they’ve been through, I don’t think we truly appreciate how much they’ve sacrificed, even as they’ve succeeded beyond expectations. As our alumni know, part of college life is the college experience — the socializing, gatherings and rites of passage that shape us as alumni, and as human beings, for the rest of our lives. Our students were denied a year of these experiences — and while we did our best to virtually celebrate formative occasions like graduation or homecoming, we also know it’s just not the same.

Obviously, I’m so incredibly proud of our healthcare workers, faculty, staff and students. They deserve not only our thanks for all they’ve done in a remarkable year, but also our respect and admiration. What they have done has been unprecedented, and they did it all with patience, grace and no small amount of good humor.

In short, thank for you everything, Lobos. Here’s to better days ahead in 2021.

Regards,

Garnett S. Stokes President, The University of New Mexico

Robert K. Hitchcock (’78 MA, ’82 PhD), Albuquerque, received the Paul Ré Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement award. He was recognized for his work across southern Africa assisting traditional hunter-gather, sustenance agriculturalist and pastoral communities negotiate an increasingly globalized world.

Albert Man-Chung Kwan (’77 BSPH, ’83 MD), Clovis, N.M., is Plains Regional Medical Center’s new medical director.

Frank H. Martinez (’72 BA, ’81 MPA), Albuquerque, was awarded the Paul Ré Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award for his lifelong community advocacy. This includes his work in forming the Citizens Information Committee of Martineztown.

Elaine C. Montague (’71 BSED, ’77 MA, ’84 EDSPC) and Gary T. Montague (’60 BAED), Albuquerque, celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. The couple was married June 17, 1960, at the Sandia Base Chapel.

Carolyn S. Montoya (’76 BSN, ’13 PhD), Albuquerque, was honored by the New Mexico Center for Nursing Excellence with the Distinguished Nurse of the Year award.

Jerome Nelson (’76 BA) has published “The Word Unveiled: A Spiritual Dictionary of Scripture.”

Joan Roberts (’73 BSED ’76 MA), and Randall S. Roberts (’73 BUS, ’76 JD), Farmington, N.M., celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on Aug. 23, 2020.

Ann E. Sims (’70 BSN), Albuquerque, and Thomas Sims celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on Aug. 9, 2020. The couple were married at the UNM Alumni Memorial Chapel and will spend their retirement traveling and volunteering.

Charles L. Wiggins (’78 BSHE), Albuquerque, director of the New Mexico Tumor Registry, was awarded with the Calum S. Muir Memorial Award, which honors those who have made substantative and outstanding contributions to the field of cancer surveillance.

1980s Carol Leslie Adkins (’81 BSCHE), Albuquerque, received the Women in Technology Award from the New Mexico Technology Council. Adkins is the director for Sandia National Laboratories’ Energy and Earth Systems Center.

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Campus Connections

Douglas Ziedonis, MD, MPH

NEW LEADER AT HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER The UNM Health Sciences Center has a new leader — Douglas Ziedonis, MD, MPH, a psychiatrist who most recently served as associate vice chancellor for Health Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

The UNM Health Sciences Center’s mission encompasses education, research and clinical care. It includes the School of Medicine and Colleges of Pharmacy, Nursing and Population Health, UNM Hospital, the UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center, UNM Sandoval Regional Medical Center, community-based clinics and a robust research arm. It employs some 10,000 people and has a budget of $2.2 billion.

Ziedonis joined UNM in December 2020 with two titles — executive vice president for UNM Health Sciences and chief executive officer of the UNM Health System — following the retirement of Paul B. Roth, MD, MS, who served in executive positions at the

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Health Sciences Center for 40 years.

UNM President Garnett S. Stokes, who made the appointment following a 10-month search, said Ziedonis is ready to lead a large and complicated academic, research and clinical system.

“He comes to UNM with a keen appreciation for the complexities of running the state’s only academic medical center, including the current stressors derived from the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic,” Stokes said.

“Additionally, his own medical and public health background and accomplishments have targeted addressing health disparities – including issues such as homelessness, mental illness, and addiction — and being a champion for diversity.”

UNM Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs James Holloway, who led the search committee, said he was impressed especially by how Ziedonis listened to multiple voices and perspectives.

Prior to joining UC San Diego, Ziedonis held leadership roles at the University of Massachusetts, UCLA, Yale University and Rutgers. The secondgeneration son of Latvian immigrants, Ziedonis received his medical degree from Pennsylvania State University Medical School and his master of public health degree from Yale. He is internationally recognized for his research in mental illness and addiction, especially tobacco addiction.

“President Stokes has created a really strong transformative leadership team with great cohesion, and I welcome the opportunity to be a part of her leadership team and commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion,

and balance across all the missions,” Ziedonis said. “As a Research 1 University, we will need to have more inter-disciplinary partnerships and innovation hubs to be successful in receiving federal and other resources, including collaborations with other universities in the state, the community and local businesses. I know that Health Sciences schools and colleges serve an important role in the future growth of the University.”

Ziedonis will be joined in New Mexico by his wife of 30 years, Patrice.

IT’S OFFICIAL

UNM’s official seal for decades, which featured a sword-carrying Spanish conquistador and a rifle-toting frontiersman, has been scrapped and replaced by a simple graphic design.

The Board of Regents chose the new design on a 3-1 vote, ending a controversy that has spanned years.

UNM began using an interim seal in 2017 following protests by Native American student groups over concerns that the seal, which had been used for decades, promoted racism and non-inclusion.

UNM proposed five seal options in early 2020 and gave the university community a chance to vote. The most popular design had a howling Lobo and the Sandia Mountains in the background.

Regents instead chose a more simplified design that officials said would better reflect the University on diplomas and graduation apparel. The University will begin the process within the next year of phasing out the interim seal and replacing it on transcripts, banners, commencement regalia, diplomas and diploma frames, as well as other university documents.

into a single oxygen atom and an O2 oxygen molecule and subsequently recombines.

Scientists 30 years ago discovered that when ozone breaks up, its O2 photofragment showed a strong preference to its rotational states with even quantum numbers, over odd quantum numbers.

Why? Distinguished Professor Hua Guo in UNM’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, with colleagues from Texas A&M University, has the answer.

In a paper published in 2020 in the Proceedings of the National Academy

Carl M. Cady (’80 BSME), Los Alamos, N.M., was named the state’s swim and dive coach of the year by the New Mexico High School Coaches Association. Cady, an engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, coaches for the Los Alamos High School Hilltoppers, the same school he attended and for which he competed.

Armondo DeCarlo (’80 BSME), Ogden, Utah, has retired after 40 years in engineering. A member of the Defense Acquisition Corps and Tau Beta Pi, his final assignment was with the nuclear missile program at Hill Air Force Base.

Ireena A. Erteza (’86 BSEE), Albuquerque, was awarded the Women in Engineering Award by the 2020 Society of Women Engineers. She was recognized for the 27 years she has spent at Sandia National Laboratories as a devoted advocate for women in the STEM field.

Maria D. Gonzales (’85MA, ’92 PhD) has published “Atop the Windmill: I Could See Forever.”

Bill A. Goodman (’82 BS), Albuquerque, was recognized as one of 2020 SBA New Mexico Small Business Award winners and given the Small-Business Person of the Year award. President and CEO of Goodman Technologies, LLC, he is credited with more than 90 publications and his company has contributed to four different space missions.

Gilbert V. Herrera (’81 BSCPE), Albuquerque, has been appointed to the newly established U.S. National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee. The group will be tasked with advising federal offices in maintaining U.S. leadership in this field of technology.

UNDERSTANDING OZONE

of Sciences, Guo explains how he solved the problem and why it matters.

“The rotational quantum number Chemists have puzzled for the dictates how fast the O2 molecule past 30 years over the strange rotates and it contains important behavior of ozone molecules in the information about how the O3 Earth’s atmosphere. molecules break up in an excited Ozone (O3), a gas known for its ability electronic state,” Guo said. “The O to absorb the sun’s potentially harmful atom is largely formed in its excited ultraviolet rays in the stratosphere, electronic state and it can have a performs that function when it splits large impact on the formation of the

Robert David Martinez (’86 BBA, ’97 MA), Albuquerque, the recently named state historian, has launched a new YouTube channel — New Mexico History in 10 Minutes, an innovative approach to public lectures in the time of the pandemic.

Michael John Newman (’85 MBA), Rio Rancho, N.M., and his wife Mary have celebrated 50 years of marriage. The couple was married September 20, 1970, at the United Nations Chapel in New York.

John Rabins (’85 PhD) has published “Defined by Fire.”

Peter A. Sanchez (’84 BBA), Albuquerque, was elected to the Bosque School board of trustees as a member of the finance committee and board vice chair. He is CEO of the Atrisco Companies.

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Campus Connections hydroxyl radical, which serves as the detergent in cleaning various pollutions in Earth’s atmosphere.”

Using a supercomputer due to the complexity of the calculations required, Guo’s team was able to solve the differential equation and definitively explain why the 02 photofragment disproportionately prefers rotational states with even quantum numbers.

According to Guo, “the even-odd propensity in the O2 rotational states stems from preference of O3 to break up within the molecular plane.”While plans for follow-up research have not been made at this time, Guo explained the importance of better understanding the processes of how ozone forms.

Physiology Center, looked to 20 years of behavioral data from the Kanyawara chimpanzee community living in Kibale National Park in Uganda for an answer.

Their study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, found that wild chimpanzees, like humans, increasingly prioritized mutual and equitable friendships with others that invested in them as they got older. Younger adult chimps, by contrast, were more likely to form lopsided relationships where

Graduate student Drew Enigk went through large numbers of aggressive interactions among the chimpanzees to see who won and lost fights, and who was submissive to whom. He then assigned dominance ranks.

Just as humans do, chimps interacted in increasingly positive ways as they got older.

“A large psychological literature suggests that in humans, old age leads to a focus on existing close relationships, increased attention to and memory for positive social interactions and reduced

their partner did not reciprocate. Older chimpanzees also were more likely to be seen alone, but tended to socialize more with important partners when they did join the group.

There were other similarities between senior chimps and humans.

engagement in tension and conflict,” Muller says. “When the end is near, people accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. While that may partly be true, our data suggest that something more fundamental may be happening with the aging process.”

OLD FRIENDS Socioemotional selectivity theory proposes that people shift their social behavior from a focus on forming new friends in youth to maintaining a smaller network of close, fulfilling relationships in old age.

“The proposal is that this shift happens because of our human ability to monitor our own personal time horizons — how much time we have left in our life — which causes us to prioritize emotionally fulfilling relationships when time is perceived to be running out,” says Martin Muller, associate professor of anthropology at UNM. Then, what about other aging primates?

Muller and colleague Melissa Emery Thompson, associate professor of anthropology and co-director of the Comparative Human and Primate

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Donald R. Smithburg (’85 MAPA), La Cygne, Kan., is interim CEO of Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services.

Assuming that wild chimpanzees, unlike humans, are not conscious of their impending mortality, shared patterns between chimpanzees and humans could represent an adaptive response where older adults focus on important social relationships that provide benefits and avoid interactions that have negative consequences as they lose competitive fighting ability.

Muller studies chimpanzee behavior and physiology to gain insight into the evolution of human behavior and physiology and believes his study may help understand how humans age.

Each year Tamarind selects an artist who produces a featured print for the institute’s Collector Club. The Collectors Club is limited to only 95 members who pay a yearly subscription fee to access the featured print. The latest Collectors Club artist is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (’80 MA), who created “Coyote in Quarantine,” a nine-color lithograph that reflects the global pandemic and public health crisis.

Painter and printmaker Quickto-See Smith is an enrolled

Richard S. Stapp (’89 MS), Arlington, Va., was promoted to chief technology officer at Northrop Grumman Corp. He will be working on new technology solutions and strengthening existing programs.

Patrick J. Wilkins (’85 BBA), Albuquerque, was elected to the Bosque School board of trustees as a member of the finance committee. He is a partner at Ricci & Company, LLC. John L. Taylor (’80 MA) has released “Navajo Scouts During the Apache Wars.”

Sheryl M. Williams Stapleton (’87 MA, ’90 EDSPC, ’13 EDD), Albuquerque, joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice.

The first African American woman to be elected to the New Mexico Legislature, she is currently serving as majority leader of the House.

1990s Fernando G. Baca (’93 BA), Albuquerque, has joined Century Bank as a vice president and commercial loan officer at the DeVargas branch in Santa Fe. Charles E. Becknell, Jr. (’93 BUS, ’08 PhD), Albuquerque, joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice. Faculty member in Africana Studies at UNM, Becknell also serves as a minister at the Emmanuel Baptist Church.

Alicia C. Benavidez (’97 BSED) and Daniel P. Benavidez (’98 BAED, ’03 MA), Glorieta, N.M., celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.

TAMARIND TURNS 60 The Tamarind Institute at UNM is having an important birthday, which it celebrated with a curated selection of lithographs spanning six decades of collaborative printmaking that was revealed online each month through February and with a limited-edition pandemic-themed print.

member of Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, who grew up in Montana and now lives in Corrales. Despite the pandemic, the world-famous lithography institute’s team of printers worked with Quick-to-See Smith remotely through the summer to produce the print.

Gregory Brown, Jr. (’95 BUS), Albuquerque, was named head boys’ basketball coach at Albuquerque High School. A former AHS player who led the team to a state championship, he was also a Western Athletic Conference player of the year during his time with the Lobos and will be bringing 15 years of coaching experience to the team.

Suzanne Wood Bruckner (’94 MBA, ’05 JD), a lawyer with Sutin, Thayer & Browne, and a member of its board of directors, and head of the firm’s tax law division, was appointed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to serve on the New Mexico Tax Practitioner Advisory Committee. (continued on page 31)

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Photo: IVOW AI

Cultivating Cultural Intelligence in AI UNM alumna Davar Ardalan’s company IVOW AI aims to put cultural literacy in artificial intelligence.

By Steve Neumann

O

ne of the most frequently used clichés in popular science fiction is robots endowed with artificial intelligence becoming self-aware and destroying humanity. And while some engineering companies like Boston Dynamics have managed fairly astonishing physical feats, like robots dancing to “Do You Love Me?”, the actual AI component of this promising technology is still unacceptably unaware of the diversity of human heritage and tradition. It’s culturally illiterate.

That’s because artificial intelligence is derived from data that’s already out there in the public sphere, and that data is mostly based on Western European heritage rather

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than the diversity of communities that actually exists in the world. To make up for this deficiency, Davar Ardalan (’93 BA) created IVOW AI, a multidisciplinary team of women technologists and storytellers whose mission is to enhance consumer engagement through the unique lens of culture and artificial intelligence.

Ardalan graduated from UNM with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and communications and went on to become an author, journalist and, now, a tech entrepreneur. Prior to starting IVOW — which stands for Intelligent Voices of Wisdom — she was a veteran journalist at NPR News for 2O years.

Ardalan — whose maiden name is Bakhtiar — chose UNM because the institution was somewhat of a family affair: at the time Ardalan enrolled, nine members of her large Iranian-American family were getting either their bachelor’s, master’s or doctorate degrees at UNM. “It was really cool,” Ardalan said, “because there was a whole Bakhtiar clan that would meet at the Student Union Building every day for lunch.”

Ardalan’s journalism journey began when she saw an ad for a work-study job at KUNM, an NPR affiliate on the UNM campus. That experience, combined with her coursework in journalism and

Photo: IVOW AI Ardalan and her company have created Sina, a digital voice assistant like Siri and Alexa, that is conversant in cultures outside the Western European tradition

communications with the late professor Charles Coats and current professor Miguel Gandert, laid the foundation for everything Ardalan has done since.

“Charles Coats was incredibly strict on journalistic ethics, but also on building a beautiful story,” Ardalan said. “And Miguel, with his background in photography, became a creative influence in the work I ended up doing around culture.”

One of the projects Ardalan’s IVOW has been working on is the Indigenous Knowledge Graph, which her team presented at the AI for Good summit in June 2020, and again at the Online News Association annual conference this past October.

“We created the Indigenous Knowledge Graph because even a simple recipe that has been passed down through generations represents a collection of components like ingredients, instructions, techniques, tools and occasions that the food is eaten at,” Ardalan said.

Because AI starts from zero knowledge about the world, the Indigenous Knowledge Graph helps it understand, for example, how significant corn is to the Navajo tradition. It does this by breaking down the recipe into its component parts, each of which becomes a piece of metadata that you can tag and allow a machine that

knows nothing about corn or beans in the Navajo context to understand that.

Thus the foundation is laid for a culturally aware intelligent agent.

Most of us are already familiar with intelligent agents like Siri and Alexa, but IVOW has created Sina (pronounced SEE-na), which combines the power of AI with ancient storytelling wisdom to create an interactive user experience that is culturally specific, narrative rich and customizable for a global appeal.

“The point is to show that we can make our Siris and Alexas more personalized, and for them to understand heritage and tradition in a more profound way,” Ardalan said. “Sina will be attached to a culture graph, just as Siri and Alexa are attached to a knowledge graph.”

Despite the global COVID-19 pandemic this past year, Ardalan’s IVOW has been moving steadily along. In November, Ardalan pitched Sina’s capabilities at WaiACCELERATE, the first ethical leadership and business acceleration program for women innovators in the field of artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning, hosted by Women in AI (WAI).

The nine-month program was the brainchild of WAI’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, Eve Logunova,

who was impressed by Ardalan’s work on Sina.

“The first thing you notice when you open Davar’s LinkedIn profile is her previous experience before she started building her company,” Logunova said. “She comes with knowledge, experience, understanding and commitment to bring change.”

“So she doesn’t just say, ‘Let me build something and see what happens.’ She spends time to really figure out every minor thing in the whole development of the solution.”

What Ardalan has been building is her response to a call from an open letter penned in 2015 by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and a group of experts in the field of artificial intelligence regarding the “research priorities of a robust and beneficial AI.” The signatories noted that it is important to research how to reap the benefits of AI while avoiding its pitfalls.

“If we continue the way we’re going right now,” Ardalan said, “we’ll just be creating products and solutions that aren’t going to necessarily be useful, or might even be detrimental to different communities. With more representative data, we know that brands, advertisers and researchers in all industries can have a deeper understanding of global audiences and make better informed decisions. So we’re pausing and looking at cultural intelligence in AI.” ❂

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Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

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Jeremy Benson (’16 MS)

Aswathy Kurup (‘17 MS)

Jeff Wigdahl (’13 MS)

Better Diagnosis – With Help From AI UNM graduates develop biomedical devices with an eye to earlier diagnosis of diabetes complications

By Leslie Linthicum

D

iabetes affects one in 10 Americans, in many cases causing vision loss or a painful complication known as peripheral neuropathy that leads to foot ulcers and, in its most advanced form, amputations.

In a suite of offices near the Albuquerque International Sunport, Simon Barriga (’02 MS, ’06 PhD) and a team of scientists and engineers at a biotech company called VisionQuest Biomedical are inventing early detection devices and software to catch complications of diabetes early and improve the lives of millions of people living with the disease.

“We want to do it cheaper, we want to do it faster and we want to increase diagnosis so everyone can have preventive tests,” says Barriga, a co-founder of the company and its CEO. Their ally in the work, he says, is artificial intelligence.

“There are multiple diseases you can diagnose using artificial intelligence,” Barriga says. Taking data collected over time on patients’ eyes, in the case of retinal disease, or feet, in the case of peripheral neuropathy, and training a computer network to recognize patterns of disease and health allows for computer-aided diagnosis.

Artificial intelligence-driven software that has seen millions of disease patterns can help doctors make a better diagnosis, or can make a diagnosis on its own, freeing doctors to focus on early treatments.

“One of the main things that we focus on is to detect diseases early, where they can be caught and treated before there is severe consequence,” Barriga says. “We want to prevent complications that end up costing a

The eye The company’s main product is called EyeStar. Diabetic retinopathy is the most common complication of diabetes. It occurs when the blood vessels inside the eyes retina begin to fail, causing hemorrhaging and inflammation. Unchecked, it causes vision loss.

Many diabetics don’t know they have the condition until it is too late. Although the condition can be detected in an annual eye exam and treated, fewer than half of diabetics get an annual eye exam.

“There are very good treatments for that now,” Barriga says, “but the key is to detect it early.”

VisionQuest’s rapid eye-screening technology uses a camera that takes a picture of the retina, without requiring dilation of the pupils. The picture is uploaded to the cloud, where VisionQuest’s artificial intelligence-driven software analyzes the image and within 30 seconds delivers a diagnosis.

The technology has not received approval lot of money to the health system and to the for use in the United States from the Food patient if they are prevented from providing and Drug Administration, but it is being for their families.” used in a network of diabetes clinics in the

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Photos: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

city of Monterrey, Mexico. The technology has been used in exams on 35,000 people in Mexico and its early detection is credited with saving 5,000 of those people from going blind, Barriga says.

“Our plan is to put this in pharmacies, so if you’re going to get your medications in the time that you wait to get your prescription, you can get your pictures taken and get your eyes examined and get your results right away without having to have an appointment with an ophthalmologist.”

The foot In peripheral neuropathy – known more commonly as “diabetes foot” — blood vessels in the hands and feet break down, damaging the nerve endings and causing the loss of feeling. Minor cuts or other damage go undetected and lead to infection and sometimes amputations.

VisionQuest’s device and technology, awarded a U.S. patent in 2014, uses infrared cameras and artificial intelligence

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that can detect the effects of diabetes in limbs early on.

VisionQuest is working with UNM’s School of Medicine to perform a clinical study, paid for by a $3 million, three-

Peter Soliz, PhD, the principal investigator in the grant, on performing the study.

Currently, physicians rely on tapping or tickling a diabetic patient’s foot to assess nerve responsiveness and send patients for further imaging if they suspect damage.

VisionQuest’s system works by detecting temperature changes in the feet. After applying a cold patch to the foot, the technology measures how quickly blood flow returns, lighting up compromised areas of a foot, which differ from the pattern of a healthy foot. In an instant, a clinician can pinpoint where compromised nerve endings are failing to deliver blood and begin to work toward better control of the disease and better limb care.

“Right now, there are not very good tools to determine any of this,” Barriga says. “The tests out there are very subjective. This will give a very good quantitative test.”

year grant from the National Institutes of Health, that will test VisionQuest’s device on several hundred patients with diabetes.

Researchers hope to begin enrolling patients this spring.

David Schade, MD, an endocrinologist at UNM Health Sciences Center and professor Surprising career of internal medicine, will be working with Barriga grew up in Trujillo, Peru.

“I was always good at math,” he says.

He dreamed of being a physicist, but his practical mother encouraged him in the direction of engineering. “So, I chose the engineering that was the closest to physics,” Barriga says, “and that was electrical engineering.” In an irony, many of his high school classmates wondered if he would end up in medical school, which he discounted because of his distaste for biology at the time. “So, to my surprise,” Barriga says, “I’ve been working for 20 years in medicine.”

Barriga received his undergraduate degree in Peru, and at age 26 he came to UNM for graduate school in the College of Engineering and stayed for his PhD. His thesis analyzed data from a device invented at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N.Y. that used light to stimulate the retina and look for changes. It was his first work in ophthalmology and led to his joining

VisionQuest shortly after it was founded by Soliz, one of his advisers at UNM. One benefit of launching a startup in Albuquerque is the ability to mine welleducated graduates of UNM as employees.

VisionQuest has on staff three UNM alumni in addition to Barriga. Research scientists at the firm include Jeff Wigdahl (’13 MS) and Jeremy Benson (’16 MS), who is also working toward his PhD in computer science at UNM. And Aswathy Kurup (’17 MS), who is working toward her PhD in engineering at UNM, is a research assistant.

Barriga also married a UNM graduate.

He and Lauren Salm (’06 BUS, ’11 MA, ’20 MS), a speech-language pathologist, married in 2016.

Barriga never would have imagined that choosing engineering as a career would lead to discovering advances in medicine, but he is grateful for the field of research he found.

“It’s so rewarding to work in the health care field, because of the impact it has in people’s lives,” Barriga says. “It really makes you feel good about the things you’re doing.

It gives you an incentive or a motivation to continue doing it.”

There are more than 450 million people around the world diagnosed with diabetes.

VisionQuest hopes to bring to market an integrated set of tools that can help reduce its complications and allow patients to lead fuller and healthier lives.

“In the future you can imagine that you walk into a pharmacy and you sit down in this device where you will get your feet examined and then you put your head on a chin rest and you can get your retina pictures taken, and in one step you’ll get all of these exams done while you’re picking up your medications,” he says. “That’s the vision for a few years down the road.” ❂

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Photo: Thaison Garcia (’06 BSED, ’12 MA)

‘Selling a World’

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Alumnus Steven Maes (’00 BUS) created iconic graphics for ‘Breaking Bad’ — and many more movies and TV shows

By Leslie Linthicum

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rowing up in the copper mining towns of Ely, Nev., and Silver City, N.M., Steven Maes (’00 BUS) loved to go to the movies and to play around with an 8-millimeter handheld movie camera his family owned.

But Maes’s first love was music. He played piano, sax and guitar, and at Silver City High School he fronted the rock band Private Session.

“I was going to be a rock star,” Maes says with a smile today.

He gave it a good shot. In fact, Maes immersed himself so much in the local music scene when he enrolled at UNM that his grades suffered and he was placed on academic probation and left college.

Maes worked in recording studios and played in bands — Split Image and Audio Drain — in Los Angeles and around the Southwest.

Sadly for Maes — but luckily for movie lovers — he realized that his dreams of making it big in rock would have to remain dreams.

At 27, married and with a baby on the way, he went back to UNM. He had an interest in film and art and he had worked at a graphic design house before his return to UNM, so Maes designed a major in University Studies that incorporated art, media and film.

After graduation, there was the question of what to do with that degree.

Maes went to work at a graphic design firm and launched a magazine about the local music scene.

He wanted to work in film, but didn’t know if he should pursue videography or screenwriting.

“I’ve always loved film,” Maes says. “As I got to experiment more with different types of film, I loved being able to capture a story. I thought capturing your own story and being able to tell it and show it was visually was amazing.”

Maes’s sister, JoAnna Maes-Corlew (’96 BFA), had gone to work in Los Angeles as a website designer for Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, and returned to Albuquerque to take a graphic design job on a television show filming in New Mexico. “Wildfire,” which ran for four seasons on ABC Family, was the first big series in New Mexico’s nascent film industry.

She heard about a new film coming to Albuquerque — “The Flock,” starring Claire Danes and Richard Gere — and suggested Maes apply for a graphic design position on the production.

He got the job.

“It was pretty incredible,” Maes says. “It was my first feature film, and it was pretty big, and it was an opportunity to see how the film business actually works.”

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Maes’s creations for the mini-series “The Lost Room” became fan favorites.

A career in pictures Let’s fast forward our story of Maes’s life 20 years — to the present.

Maes now has an IMDb entry that scrolls on for screens, with art department credits for 46 films and TV series.

It reads like a list of just about everything made in New Mexico since the film and TV industry blew up in Albuquerque and Santa Fe just around the time Maes was graduating from UNM. “In the Valley of Elah.” “Sunshine Cleaning.” “A Million Ways to Die in the West.” “The Ridiculous 6.” “In Plain Sight.”

“Longmire.” “Roswell.”

And, of course, “Breaking Bad.” The art director on a film or television show is responsible for every space the viewer sees: the buildings, interiors and props. Graphic designers, part of the art team, design every unique item that isn’t a ready-made prop — the cover of a book, the sign on the tavern, a painting hanging on a living room wall.

“It’s different from commercial graphic design in the sense that if you’re doing graphic design for a marketing firm, you’re trying to make the best possible graphic that

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tells a story or sells a product,” Maes says.

“In film it’s about selling a world. You’re trying to sell an environment. You’re not trying to design beautiful graphic design.

You’re trying to design graphics that will sell the reality of a real world.”

Maes has worked as a graphic designer, assistant art director and art director, a more managerial role.

Big Break Maes, on some rare time off from his current gig, assistant art director on “Outer Range,” an Amazon drama series being filmed at I-25 Studios and on location in New Mexico, is happy to reminisce about the images he is most associated with — those iconic touchstones that were part of “Breaking Bad.” He was lead graphic designer on the first three seasons of the show that drew a fanatic following and put Albuquerque on the map.

“I designed all of the graphics for the first three seasons of ‘Breaking Bad,’” Maes says, taking care to clarify that the show’s title logo — the periodic table with the two big Bs — was the work of show’s creator Vince Gilligan.

Maes’s contribution to the iconography was lawyer Saul Goodman’s logo (“In legal trouble? Better Call Saul!”) and Goodman’s sleazy strip mall office; Shraederbrau beer, the homebrew of Walter White’s brother-in-law Hank; the A-1 Car Wash, where White and his wife, Skylar, laundered their meth money; and the sign and graphics for Los Pollos Hermanos, the chicken restaurant run as a front for drug kingpin Gus Fring.

A local illustrator came up with the two chicken characters for Los Pollos Hermanos and Maes and partner Robb Wilson King worked with them to devise a logo.

“We went through so many really funny versions of the logo,” Maes remembers. “We had the characters inside a frying pan at one point.

And then we had them in a lowrider, which was kind of cool. And then we settled on them in the mariachi outfits.”

Los Pollos Hermanos, like so many visuals in the series, draws tourists to Albuquerque for “Breaking Bad” tours and is reproduced on collectibles.

“It’s amazing to see where all of these things have gone. They’re iconic now,” Maes says. While he’s tired of seeing his work copied on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs to tennis shoes (and, for the record, he gets no licensing fees from any merchandise), he is grateful to have worked on a hit show in which graphic design played such a big role.

Another Maes creation for “The Lost Room.”

Photo: Kayleigh Maes ('19 BA)

“I feel super fortunate to have been a part of that,” Maes says, “just because you never know where these things are going to go.”

Before “Breaking Bad,” Maes already had an enthusiastic cult following for the prop objects he created for the SyFy Channel mini-series “The Lost Room,” another filmed-in-New Mexico hit. The series centers on Room 10 of the Sunshine Motel, where objects — a key, an ashtray, a bus ticket and many more — hold certain powers.

“The show clicked with people and ended up becoming a cult favorite and it spawned all of these fan clubs for the objects,” Maes says.

Family business Maes’s sister JoAnna, who now lives in Bernalillo, has her own successful career in TV and film. She has done graphic design on a number of New Mexico productions, including “Godless,” “Manhattan,” “Longmire,” “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” Her husband Rob Corlew has worked as a production coordinator on “In Plain Sight,” “In the Valley of Elah,” “No Country for Old Men,” and other productions.

Maes’s older daughter Kayleigh (’19 BA) graduated from UNM with a film degree, is working as a photographer and already has her own IMDb entry. She had small roles in the TV series “Roswell” and in the mini-series “Godless.”

And younger daughter Ashleigh, a senior in high school, has acted in the TV movie “Beyond the Blackboard” and the USA Network series “Dig.” For an aspiring rock star, Maes’s career in film and TV and the ability to live and work in Albuquerque has been an unexpected surprise.

“The ability to be here and work on really cool big things, is such a bonus,” Maes says. “I couldn’t ask for anything else.

I never imagined it,” Maes says. ❂

Speed racers After working on other writers’ and directors’ films for two decades, Maes found his own story to tell and in 2019 released his own movie.

From the dirt bikes he rode as a kid to the motorcycles he raced as an adult, Maes has always had a place in his heart for biker culture, especially the cafe racer and American rocker movement of tuned-up vintage bikes, stiff Levi’s, leather jackets and speed.

After five years of filming that took him from Great Britain to Mexico to Hong Kong and across the U.S., Maes finished his first full-length documentary film, “Caffeine and Gasoline: Evolution of the American Rocker.”

He wrote and directed the labor of love and included in it interviews with many of the men and women he races with, including his partner in Rust Is Gold, a coffee shop, podcast and motorcycle racing team, Thaison Garcia (’06 BSED, ’12 MA).

“Caffeine & Gasoline” debuted at the 2019 Albuquerque Film and Music Experience festival, where it won Best New Mexico Film. It traveled to Italy for the MotoTematica Rome Motorcycle Film Festival, where it won Best Documentary. The film has a scheduled release of April 20 on Amazon Prime and Hulu.

“From the beginning, the goal was to make my own films and tell my own stories,” Maes says.

Assuming that most people know nothing of the cafe racer culture, Maes starts the film at the movement’s beginning in London in the 1960s and the bike racers who sped from club to club. The “rocker” part of their name came from the rock ‘n’ roll they listened to.

Maes follows the movement as it migrated to the U.S., and took on its own music and style as it spread from garage to garage and race track to race track.

Maes envisioned the film as a 20-minute short about the history of cafe racers, but it grew into full-length film as one racer led to another.

The film features familiar faces, including actress Katee Sackhoff, who Maes met when he worked on “Longmire,” and Antoine Predock, the noted architect who designed the UNM School of Architecture & Planning building.

Maes can still recall the joy of hopping on a dirt bike as a kid in Nevada and riding in the hills until dark. He started riding a dirt bike then he was 7 and rode ATVs and snowmobiles before he got his first motorcycle when he was 18. He now rides and races a 1975 BMW R75/6.

“I have always had a fascination with vintage things.

I like old cars, old bikes — just things that are antique,” he says. “So the story of this type of bikes really resonated with me.”

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➤

Face Masks, Pivots and Zoom How UNM adapted to the oddest of academic years

By Leslie Linthicum

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P

rofessor Eva Chi and her team of instructors in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering spent their summer puzzling through some big academic challenges: How to teach a hands-on, upper-level chemical engineering lab course under social distancing restrictions.

Owen Whooley, as associate professor of Sociology, had his own concerns. Should he teach his Health, Medicine and Human Values course entirely online or try for an anything-but-normal in-person class once a week? How could he encourage class participation in a disembodied virtual world? And how could he connect with students he would never see in person?

As the Spring 2020 semester ended in a hurried rush out the door and academics finished online, students were left to wonder what the Fall semester would look like and faculty members in every department scrambled to improve their online chops.

The strangest academic year anyone could imagine at UNM has played out over the past few months mostly on computer screens. For some it has meant freedom never enjoyed in a normal school year ­— freedom to travel, work and complete coursework from anywhere at any time. For others, it has been a series of hurdles — to focus and to find human connection.

Photos: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

Freshman year reimagined ‘It feels like we’re stuck in a cycle that we can’t get out of.’

- Jaanai Giselle Martinez

Jaanai Giselle Martinez graduated from College & Career High School, a small Albuquerque magnet school, in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic closed in on New Mexico. She knew her freshman year at UNM would be different from what she imagined when she dreamed of going to college. But, still, every day surprises her.

“I imagined that I would be able to go to the library with my friends. I would gather for lunch,” Martinez says as her first semester winds down. “I imagined I would take advantage of any opportunity we got to socialize to the point where I would almost never be alone.”

Instead, Martinez has been closed in a four-bedroom apartment-style dorm suite with three roommates for the entire semester taking all of her courses online.

“Luckily, I got a good group of roommates, so because of them I feel like I have a little bit of a social circle,” Martinez says. “We do everything together, which is a good thing and bad thing sometimes. We don’t really see anyone else, just to play it safe.”

Inside the apartment, the four don’t wear masks, but they mask up any time they leave their unit.

All are members of the close cohort of freshman in the Combined BA/MD Degree Program, which puts them on a path to UNM’s School of Medicine after they successfully complete their bachelor’s degrees. Martinez, who has wanted to be a doctor ever since she can remember, is taking general pre-med courses — chemistry and calculus — along with Spanish and a sociology course that focuses on medicine.

Since arriving on campus in August, Martinez has never walked into a classroom building and attended a course with other students. She hasn’t met any of her professors. Even the experiments in her chemistry class have been online.

Martinez “attends” scheduled classes each day, but they are all remote.

Some of Martinez’s roommates are in the same classes, so for those they put the course on the TV in their living room and watch and take notes together.

“We try to make it feel as normal as possible,” she says.

Martinez, who is 19, took some college courses at Central New Mexico College during high school and she misses the

interaction with instructors that happens during class and also less formally in the minutes before and after class.

“I know what it feels like to just able to go to your professor and ask them something or just even ask them how their day is. And because of the mode we’re in, it’s hard to even ask how is your day, because you’re interrupting a class. There’s no asking for help.

There’s no making conversation,” she says.

The social life of a freshman, which can be exciting and sometimes distracting, isn’t happening. For fun, Martinez and her roommates stream movies or TV shows in their apartment.

“One time me and my roommates walked through campus,” Martinez says, “but we got very lost and had to use GPS to get back.”

Even La Posada, the dining hall, looks different. Instead of getting a meal and then finding a table to sit and eat with friends, all meals are packaged to go and meals are eaten outside or back at the dorm.

Even so, Martinez is happy to be on campus, to prevent the distractions of home.

And she is grateful for the relationships she has developed with her roommates.

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Photo: Courtesy Owen Whooley

distancing. “I quickly realized that was going to be untenable,” Whooley says. “I’ll be honest — I didn’t want to teach online.

I’ve never taught online before and I’d never wanted to teach online, so I tried hard to maintain some sort of in-class element. Fear of the unknown was a major motivator, but you really lose something when you’re not in the same space. You lose the informal interactions that happen before class and after class. You lose the feedback. You lose some of the intimacy and you lose some of the community.”

But like so many things during the pandemic, he made peace with the situation and worked to make the best of it.

Whooley ended up restructuring most - Owen Whooley of the class, scrapping a group presentation and replacing it with a group paper, and establishing a discussion board that resembled a text chain in an attempt to preserve group interaction.

For class, Whooley set up his camera in his home office with a burnt orange “This was all uncharted territory,” says accent wall behind him and on occasion Whooley, who has been teaching for eight his two small children piping up from their years at UNM and has taught Health, home classrooms in other rooms of the Medicine and Human Values seven times. house. And the class was conducted twice Normally he would meet his students a week much like any business meeting or in Dane Smith Hall or another classroom building. Students — 28 this semester — would extended family gathering conducted on be arranged in desks and he would lecture, use Zoom, with him and his students appearing PowerPoint, lead discussions and assign small on a grid.

“I learned quickly how to hide myself, group projects to be done in class. because I don’t like lecturing to myself,” “It’s a lecture-discussion hybrid and one Whooley says. Zoom is simultaneously of the things that’s changed this year is it’s more distant and more intimate because more lecture than I would like,” Whooley faces are so close. says. “Rather than drone on and on, I like “At first I was pretty insistent on having to keep them on their toes and encourage students keep their cameras on, but I quickly active participation.” realized it was kind of sensory overload to Whooley was on sabbatical when have 25 faces staring at you,” he says. campus closed at the end of the 2019 To encourage participation, Whooley 2020 academic year, so he missed the lectured for several minutes, then difficult transition from in-person to remote teaching. Over the summer he took paused for questions or discussion, then resumed lecturing. advantage of a week-long online teaching training provided by UNM and he thought “I would say it went better than expected a lot about how to engage students virtually. but not as good as it normally does,” he says. “You develop a certain style that works He hoped to make the course an infor you, a certain classroom performance. person/remote hybrid, but he would have And I don’t think I fully adapted that been able to meet with only one third of his students once a week to allow sufficient online. I tend to be far more funny and

Learning new moves ‘I decided that I wasn’t going

to pretend that

this was normal.’

“It’s not anyone’s fault, obviously, but I do feel like we were robbed a little bit. Robbed of what we could have potentially got from our education,” Martinez says. “It feels like we’re stuck in a cycle that we can’t get out of that just involves our room.”

One of the bright spots in Martinez’s schedule has been her Health, Medicine and Human Values course, which examines how social factors shape health outcomes.

Part of the course work is keeping a “COVID diary,” where students relate the concepts they learn in class to what is going on in real time with COVID-19.

Martinez can see the meaning behind the concepts playing out in the news every day, and she looks forward to the course because of the professor’s enthusiasm.

“He doesn’t seem like he’s lecturing; he seems like he’s just talking to us,” Martinez says. “He’s a professor I would have loved to meet in person.”

Owen Whooley, an assistant professor who was on the other side of the Zoom screen for Martinez’s sociology course, is relieved when told he was able to break through the glass barrier created by remote teaching.

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Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

have a banter back and forth. I felt like my jokes fell flat.”

In preparation, Whooley reflected on the question: What does it mean to learn during a global pandemic?

“People are stressed out. They’re isolated.

They’re alienated from their family.

These are freshman who are starting a huge transition under really crappy circumstances,” he says.

He decided not to pretend the class was normal and concentrate on making sure his students were OK. “So, more so than I normally do, I tried to convey to the students, ‘Look, I know this is hard. We’ll get through this. If you need anything, come to me. I care about you.’”

In mid December The New York Times published its annual The Year in Pictures, featuring the best photos published in the year. Representing the month of November was a bright photo of a posse of Navajo Nation tribal members heading to vote on horseback on election day. The photographer was Sharon Chischilly, a junior journalism and communications major at UNM. Disruption caused by the pandemic has had odd benefits for Chischilly.

When UNM decided to finish the Spring 2020 semester online, Chischilly went home to Manuelito, N.M., on the Navajo reservation. The Navajo Nation was being ravaged by COVID-19 and Chischilly took advantage of free time to photograph its effects.

She met a reporter from The Washington Post at a food distribution event who asked her if she might sell some photos to the newspaper. That led to her first freelance assignment and broke open a new world for Chischilly.

Chischilly, who describes herself as a selftaught photographer who still has a lot to learn, now has the kinds of photo clips many veteran photojournalists only dream of.

“Strangely, for me, I was given an opportunity to work for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal while going to school online,” says Chischilly. “There’s a lot of negatives

Opportunity from chaos ‘It’s complicated.’

- Sharon Chischilly

about what’s happened — it’s hard to see my people struggling. And this has tested me emotionally and mentally. But there’s a lot of positives.”

Chischilly was taking four classes last Spring semester while juggling her new freelance career, and she tried to be at home or at a McDonald’s with free WiFi during her scheduled Zoom classes. One afternoon, with class meeting scheduled, she found herself on a reservation road far from internet.

“I pulled over on the side of the road and got on using my phone. But there’s not really good service here and it kept dropping me out,” she says. “I was freaking out.” When she reached reliable internet she messaged the instructor, who understood.

When the Spring semester ended, Chischilly took the summer off and got an internship at the Navajo Times in Window Rock., Ariz. She continued to freelance through the summer. Caught up in freelancing, working and helping her family in Manuelito (her father lost his job during the pandemic), Chischilly missed the deadline to apply to renew her tribal scholarship. Because she had

to pay for school on her own, she chose to go part-time for the Fall semester and juggled only two courses — journalism and photojournalism — while continuing to work. She maintained her spot in the dormitory at Lobo Rainforest and bounced back and forth between Albuquerque and the reservation so she could attend her photojournalism course, a hybrid inperson/online model.

With a limit on six students and everyone in face masks or face shields, “It was really strange,” she says. But it allowed for something approaching a normal course.

As the Fall semester neared finals, Chischilly was offered a full-time job at the Navajo Times.

Pre-pandemic, she would have had to choose between a job in her chosen profession or finishing her degree. With the pandemic continuing unabated and UNM’s Spring 2021 semester online, Chischilly could have both.

“It’s complicated,” she says. “If this pandemic wasn’t happening, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

Eva Chi, a professor and Regents’ Lecturer in the Department of Chemical

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Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

unsafe. So Chi divided the class into fourperson teams and had the teams choose only two members to come to the lab to perform the experiment.

Students watched a series of videos to understand the lab process rather than watching an experiment in person before they designed and conducted their experiment. Chi visited the lab twice and saw students in person, but the rest of the course was completely virtual and asynchronistic, meaning the students could access the lessons whenever they wanted within a week.

“It’s been a really hard transition for lots - Eva Chi of reasons,” Chi says. “How do you build a community when you don’t see each other?”

Chi required more video reports than written reports, she said, so students had to show up in front of their camera and speak to someone. Instead of messaging her feedback, she also recorded videos so students could see and hear her.

Toward the end of the semester, Chi also When the class convened online, the reimagined the curriculum to focus on the syllabus was all about safety and creativity daunting tasks ahead for seniors graduating — learning about the chemical distillation during the economic and social disruption process, talking to local brewers about of a pandemic — applying to grad school their techniques and then designing a lab or finding a job. She reached out to alumni experiment that would ideally result in and friends and invited them to present hand sanitizer that could be distributed to video seminars about their jobs or a community of need identified by each graduate programs. student team.

“I suppose we could have done it the way Chi intends to take some of those new practices forward, even it is safe to return to we did before, but we thought, ‘This is a great opportunity for us to make a change,’” in-person class. she says. “It was the spirit of what can we do “I don’t think we’ll go back to how it was,” she says. for our community and how can we make Colman Sandler, one of Chi’s students, this relevant. It was the spirit of — hey, we visited Broken Trail Spirits and Brew, a craft are problem solvers.” distillery and brewery in Albuquerque that Chi felt the coursework tapped into the early on in the pandemic distilled ethanol goals of chemical engineering majors — to formulate hand sanitizer, which it to improve the environment and health offered for free. of communities.

Rather than have each of the 70 students He learned about the chemistry of their distilling process and he and his teammates perform two experiments during the decided to start with a solution based on semester, the lab component was pared to vodka — 40 percent alcohol — to get to just one experiment. Some international the end product of a hand sanitizer that students had returned to their home was 80 percent to 85 percent. Team countries over the summer and not member Alycia Galindo worked returned. Other students had health out the calculations that would tell the conditions that made interaction in a lab

Experimenting with science ‘We changed everything.’

& Biological Engineering, had the summer to consider how to reimagine a chemical engineering laboratory course for seniors.

Labs are normally bustling places that rely on human connections to puzzle through problems.

“We started to talk in earnest about how we have to do things differently in that class because the way we had done it before was just not going to work — with the restrictions from the University and also just for the safety and well-being of our students and us,” Chi says.

The mission was how to minimize contact and exposure to COVID-19 but also provide a good learning experience.

Chi had never taught online, but members of her instructional team had experience with online learning.

“We changed everything,” she says.

Rather than choose a textbook experiment for the course’s main objective of teaching chemical distillation, Chi took a page from breweries and distilleries, who were using their knowledge of distillation to rush much-needed hand sanitizer into the community.

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Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

distillation column what to do during the experiment.

Galindo, who was taking six classes during the semester, also found an extra push to perform because the class project was relevant.

Locked away in a room of her family home in Albuquerque to study without distractions during the online semester, Galindo was excited to work on something relevant and useful and also to have the opportunity to design her own distillation process rather than rely on an experiment from a book.

“It was actually really motivating,” says Galindo, 21. “We were actually doing something that could help the community during the pandemic and it was really exciting to go into the lab and actually see what we designed from scratch come to life.”

The lab day was challenging, as Sandler and Galindo had only a few hours to familiarize themselves with the complicated distillation column — a tall glass cylinder that separates water and alcohol according to predetermined calculations to arrive at a desired solution.

Holing up with his roommates and attending his classes online, Sandler found the lab one was one of the bright spots in a dreary semester.

“I was definitely more motivated for the lab than I was for my other classes,” Sandler says.

Sandler also appreciated the professional development portion of the course, as he struggles with whether to choose graduate school or industry when he graduates — most likely via Zoom — later this year.

Galindo, motivated by what looks like a bleak job market, is applying to PhD programs for next year. And she found her six-course semester in lockdown was a success.

“It was a lot to handle, but personally I kind of enjoyed it,” Galindo says. “I couldn’t go out with friends, so all I could do was school work. When people ask someday, ‘What did you during the pandemic?’ I’ll say I sat there and I learned!” ❂

Locked down senior year ‘It was actually really motivating.’

- Alycia Galindo

Photo: Kimberly Delker/UNM Senior Alycia Galindo conducts a socially distanced chemical engineering lab experiment.

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Wiping Out SARS-CoV-2 UNM team invents antimicrobial polymers that neutralize the coronavirus

By Leslie Linthicum

I

n the laboratories of the nation’s top-tier research universities, scientists experiment and engineers tinker, looking to expand fundamental knowledge about cells, space, subatomic particles and everything else around us.

Often, that basic science leads to discoveries and sometimes those discoveries are made at exactly the right time.

David Whitten has never liked the dueling reputations of basic science research as science for science’s sake and applicationdriven research as the problem-solver.

“I don’t buy that,” says Whitten, a Distinguished Professor in UNM’s Department of Biological & Chemical Engineering. “I think a lot of scientificdriven research finds an application — even if you weren’t in search of it.”

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Photo: UNM

David Whitten

Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

Eva Chi

Whitten has focused a long career on conjugated polymers, something few of us have ever heard of, much less understand. They are a class of polymers — substances composed of linked large molecules — that are complicated organic semiconductors.

“You can think of them as being like beads that you string,” Whitten explains.

“One bead touches another and another, and so forth. It’s a repeating pattern and that motif goes on and on and on. When certain of the polymers touch, they conduct electricity. And, when they are excited by being exposed to light, they absorb light and emit light.”

He has worked on these synthetic molecules and their biological applications for the past 15 years.

Elsewhere in the Department of Biological & Chemical Engineering, Professor Eva Chi has collaborated with Whitten to learn more about his synthetic polymers.

“My collaborations with him have been figuring out why these work and how these work,” Chi says.

Nearly a decade ago, the team discovered that the excitable polymers were really good at acting as antimicrobials, selectively inactivating bad bacteria, spores and some viruses.

They published a paper on their work in 2011.

Then came coronavirus.

“At the beginning of the pandemic we were just all scrambling — what can we do to contribute during this pandemic?”

Chi recalls.

They thought back to their paper and remembered that the properties they were studying were also antiviral.

Whitten and Chi reached out to Alison Kell, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology at the UNM School of Medicine, whose lab studies RNA viruses, and who had access to samples of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

They didn’t see any reason their polymers wouldn’t grab onto SARS-CoV-2, so when UNM’s labs reopened in June, Chi and Whitten chose polymers they thought were most promising, given the characteristics of the virus, then made solutions containing them and took them to Kell’s lab at the Health Sciences Center.

Kell got back to them with a week.

They worked.

It’s tempting to say the team found a weapon to kill COVID. But SARS-CoV-2 is a virus — meaning it’s not made out of cells and is unable to grow on its own. A virus is more like an android or a robot that can invade a cell and instruct it to manufacture more virus. So the UNM polymer discovery doesn’t kill coronavirus; rather it attracts the virus and immobilizes it. Then, when exposed to light, it inactivates the virus so it no longer spreads.

They began to run more tests to make sure the results weren’t a fluke and settled on two different polymers that both inactivated the virus.

“They all were very effective and there was no indication the coronavirus could

be resistant to our materials. We could inactivate them completely,” Chi says.

“This to us was a really big discovery and we were really excited about it,” Whitten said.

They wrote a paper on their results (published in December in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces), filed for patents on the process and began working with BioSafe Defenses, a tech transfer company that both are part of, to secure expedited registration of their product with the Environmental Protection Agency so it can be marketed.

“In terms of how effective these compounds are, they’re really outstanding,” says Chi, who envisions the company producing disinfecting wipes, sprays and even fabrics for face masks.

The benefit of a polymer-based disinfecting product is its effectiveness and its staying power.

“The polymers, having all this charge, they will stay on a surface for quite a long time — several days — and continue to be effective,” Whitten says. Additionally, surfaces can be wiped off and the coating still stays effective.

That could be a game-changer in terms of opening the economy while still staying safe. Restaurants could use the product on tables a couple of times a week; malls could use it on handrails and door handles; sports stadiums could wipe down seats; medical offices and hospitals could avoid constantly wiping down everything touched by patients and caregivers.

There’s also promise in making personal protective equipment more effective by

incorporating the polymer material in the outer layer of face masks, where it could sequester the virus and inactivate it before it reached a user’s airway.

Whitten is ecstatic about the discovery, calling it “the most exciting work I’ve ever been involved with.”

After years of studying the repeating beads of polymers, he says, “We’re poised to try to make this into something useful that could really help humanity.”

Whitten is also excited about seeing the fruits of cross-university collaboration.

The team involved also included Linnea Ista in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering, Florencia A. Monge, of UNM’s Center for Biomedical Engineering, Virginie Bondu of the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology at the UNM School of Medicine and Patrick L. Donabedian of the Nanoscience and Microsystems Engineering graduate program at UNM. Also on the team are Kirk S. Schanze and Pradeepkumar Jagadesan, both of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“I think the thing that is most satisfying to me, and I would guess also to my colleagues, is we’re doing something that could really mitigate the pandemic and help mitigate future pandemics,” Whitten says. “Invariably there will be variations of the coronavirus that will cause problems in the future.

I think this is a constant threat but we can hopefully make it not a pandemic in future years.” ❂

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A Career in Flight Engineer Thomas H. Gray (BSEE ‘61) helped Boeing aircraft fly right

By Amanda Gardner

T

homas Gray’s life story is equally the story of modern air travel.

During his 34-year career with The Boeing Company, Gray, who graduated from UNM with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1961, was a flight test engineer on almost every Boeing commercial aircraft, from the 707 through the 767. In February 1969, he also became the first nonpilot to fly on the first 747, when the new jet took flight from its birthplace in Everett, Wash., to Seattle.

Transportation is in Gray’s blood.

Both his father and his grandfather worked on the railroad, his father as a porter for the Pullman Company on the fabled Santa Fe Super Chief running from Chicago to L.A. At Pullman, porters made beds and did housekeeping in the sleeper cars, often catering to Hollywood stars making their way across the country.

On other rail lines, Black brakemen like Gray’s grandfather were also known as porters.

His grandmother and mother sold box lunches to train travelers stopping in Albuquerque who couldn’t afford the local

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Fred Harvey restaurant. That’s how his mother met Gray ’s father.

Gray’s own love affair with transportation began long before he entered UNM. Growing up off Lead and Broadway, he was not only next to the train tracks, but he was also not far from Kirtland Air Force Base. As troops mobilized to fight in World War II, "I watched all the planes going off to war from the end of Kirtland’s runway,” he remembers.

After graduating from Albuquerque High School, Gray enrolled at UNM. He was one of only a few Black students at a time when UNM had just started recruiting Black football players, including his friends Don Perkins (’60 BA), who became a running back for the Dallas Cowboys, and Edward Lewis (’64 BA, ’66 MA), who went on to co-found Essence Magazine.

During the summers, Gray worked as a chair car attendant on the Santa Fe Railroad Superliners, the El Capitan and the Chief.

Gray joined the New Mexico Air National Guard before his UNM graduation and later transferred and served in the Washington State Air National Guard when he moved to Seattle.

Boeing recruited Gray soon after he graduated from UNM at “the ground floor of the Jet Age,” he recalls. His job was to design and install instrumentation equipment required to monitor and record all the aircraft parameters involved in flight testing each new aircraft model. As a flight test engineer and crew member his role was to monitor and tape record in flight the data from multiple sensors spread all over the aircraft to measure data ­— aerodynamic performance such as airspeed, altitude and control surface positions — not normally collected on a production version of the same aircraft.

In the mid 1960s Gray was loaned out to the Advanced Marine Systems organization to work on the instrumentation in Boeing’s jet-powered research hydrofoil, which involved test runs up and down Puget Sound. Gray found that flying a wing under water was quite different than an airfoil in the atmosphere.

He returned to the Commercial Aviation Division when Boeing started flight testing the first 737 aircraft in 1966 which was followed by the 747, 757 and 767 programs.

Thomas Gray at the Seattle Museum of Flight.

Joseph P. Coleman (’90 BUS), Albuquerque, has retired as Valley High School’s boys basketball coach. A 1984 VHS graduate, he reached four state championship games and took home three blue trophies in his 23-season career.

Jason C. Dykehouse (’95 BA) has written the novel “A Reduction of Men.”

Over the years, flight testing has changed.

“On the first 747, we had 700 measurements to evaluate the aircraft performance,” he says. Today, flight test engineers are able to record and study some 20,000 different measurements due to advances in digital and computer technology.

Along with Boeing and the rest of the world, Gray then joined the Space Age. In 1977, Gray participated in the space shuttle Enterprise landing tests at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

“With the Space Shuttle development, engineers came up with a plan to carry and launch the shuttle from atop a 747,” he remembers. “We actually put our test equipment in the 747 carrier aircraft and Boeing structural engineers and mechanics reinforced the top of the 747 to carry the weight of the shuttle.”

Over the years, Gray has brushed with fame and history, having been on a test program on the airplane that became the Air Force One that flew President John F. Kennedy to Dallas and where Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office after JFK’s assassination there. He had been on flight tests with space shuttle astronauts Dick Scobee, Judy Resnik and Sally Ride.

He even flew a 747 once — holding the controls for four minutes while the pilot stepped away to use the restroom.

Gray says he was never nervous taking jets up for their first flights, and all of his test flights went off without a hitch, except one — on July 5, 1974, when he was doing brake testing on a new 747 aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base.

“The test requirements were to do what is called a ‘refused takeoff ’,” he says.

“The pilot gets the fully fueled 747 up to takeoff speed and then uses the brakes to bring the airplane to a full stop on the runway.”

Due to the high energy stop, the fiery brakes disintegrated, and the 16 tires started exploding and burning. “That gets your attention really quick when you’re sitting at a monitor station in the middle of the aircraft,” Gray recalls.

Gray used the emergency escape ladder while tire debris was still flying around him. In the commotion he missed the bottom ladder rungs, which resulted in a brief hospital stay. Fortunately, no bones were broken. “Flying on test airplanes was a lot safer,” he says.

Gray retired in 1995 and is now a docent at the Seattle Museum of Flight and a member of the Sam Bruce Chapter of Tuskegee Airmen, Inc., an organization that preserves the heritage of the original Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. He and his wife, Nyra, have two sons and two grandchildren.

One thing that hasn’t changed is Gray’s commitment to UNM, which he calls his “neighborhood school.” This is reflected in his contributions to the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department and his service as a past president of the Seattle Chapter and past board member of the UNM Alumni Association.

“He’s from New Mexico no matter where he is,” Nyra says. ❂

Laura Gutierrez-Spencer (’90 PhD), Las Cruces, N.M., retired as director of Chicano Programs at New Mexico State University.

She is a screenwriter/executive producer for the movie “Magic Love Dust.”

Paul L. Huitt (‘92 BUS, ‘96 MA), Albuquerque, has retired from coaching baseball at Sandia Preparatory School after 21 seasons and six state championships. A former UNM player, he will still continue to teach.

David H. Johnson (’94 JD), a lawyer with Sutin, Thayer & Browne, co-authored the New Mexico chapter of “Corporate Practice of Medicine: A 50 State Survey,” second edition, published by the American Health Lawyers Association.

Kiran Katira (’99 EDSPC, ’05 PhD), Rio Rancho, N.M., joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice. Katira is cofounder of the UNM Community Engagement Center and a national trainer with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond.

Edward S. Lopez (’90 BA), Newport Beach, Calif., is a member of the board of directors of The Parker Center for Family Business.

Santana M. Macias-Fontana (’98 MD), Corrales, N.M., was elected to the Bosque School board of trustees as board and executive committee chair. She is currently a physician with Presbyterian Medical Group.

Daniel Joseph Mayfield (’99 BA), Albuquerque, was promoted to vice president of government affairs at the Credit Union Association of New Mexico and president of Leverage Point.

Maria T. Mora (’90 BA, ’92 MA), St. Louis, Mo., received the 2020 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring for her multiple roles at the University of Missouri.

Marisa I. Mulkey (’92 BA), Village of Los Ranchos, N.M., was elected to the Bosque School board of trustees as a member of the finance committee. She is the executive vice president and chief strategic officer at DreamSpring.

David Neidhart (’90 MD), Farmington, N.M., of San Juan Oncology Associates, has opened the Four Corners Cancer Center.

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UNM PEOPLE CHANGING WORLDS

Breaking Boundaries A Scholarship for Students with Disabilities Honors a Courageous UNM Alumna

By Hilary Mayall Jetty

Allison Yabroff and her beloved "Auntie Anne" during a 1999 trip to San Diego, CA.

B

urden. The word seared into Anne Thomas’ consciousness as she struggled to cope with her new reality.

She’d been an independent, adventurous 18-year-old hitchhiking through Europe in 1976, when a car accident left her paralyzed from the chest down. And now a doctor was suggesting that this former college athlete resign herself to life in a nursing home to avoid being a burden to her family.

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Thomas deeply resented and resisted this attempt to label her. Disability and adversity tested her patience and resolve throughout her life. Yet her determination to break though physical, psychological and societal barriers, for herself and others facing similar challenges, led to remarkable personal and professional achievements. Her family established the Anne B. Thomas No Bounds Scholarship at UNM after her death in 2019, to honor

her accomplishments and provide tuition assistance for undergraduate students with disabilities. They managed to endow the fund with the help of family, friends and former colleagues, and a few bake sales.

Thomas was known as a brilliant, gutsy woman with a kind heart and a wicked sense of humor. Born in the same year as Thomas’ accident, Allison Yabroff ’s earliest childhood memories of her beloved Auntie Anne always included a wheelchair.

“It was just something that was there,” she said, “but it didn’t define her in any way in my eyes. She was always so loving and fun to be around, eager to talk, play games and tell jokes.”

In 1977, Thomas completed rehab in California. She wanted to finish her undergraduate degree, which she’d begun in Washington, D.C., before her accident. Yabroff ’s family was living in Albuquerque. “The Americans with Disabilities Act wasn’t passed until 1990,” she recalled, “and most places were very hard to get around. But UNM was a much more accessible campus, with elevators and ramps, so Anne decided to give it a go.”

After earning her BA, Thomas received her JD from the UNM School of Law in 1983. She learned to drive with hand controls, enjoyed being involved in the university community, and fell in love with New Mexico. “This was the place where she regained her independence,” Yabroff noted. “Once she had her accident, she was dependent on family, friends and doctors. When she came to Albuquerque, to UNM, she really restarted her life.”

Throughout her career, Thomas worked and traveled far beyond New Mexico’s borders. A fierce advocate for equality, inclusion and justice, she served as a civil rights attorney, dispute resolution expert and leadership development professional. She worked at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington during the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Thomas happily returned to Albuquerque in 1990 to serve in the UNM Office of Equal Opportunity, eventually becoming its director. She worked on cases of sexual harassment, and pioneered domestic partnership rights on campus for

employees. An opportunity to lead the World Bank’s offices of diversity training and employee mediation disputes took her back to D.C. in 2000.

However, in addition to the trials of life in a wheelchair, Thomas had been diagnosed with essential thrombocythemia, a bone marrow disorder. The illness eventually forced her to stop working, and prevented her from returning to the high desert home she cherished. True to her nature, she looked toward a more distant horizon, enrolled in an improv class and discovered a talent for storytelling. This creative passion enabled her to connect with people in new and deeper ways as she revealed her personal experiences. In 2013 she won the National Storytelling Festival Slam.

Far from being a burden to anyone, Thomas lived a full life, with no bounds.

She found love, traveled the world, learned to ski and scuba dive, and adored dancing. Although she wasn’t able to realize her dream of returning to Albuquerque in retirement, her legacy will endure. Yabroff and her family are continuing to raise awareness and funds to increase the scholarship’s impact.

“UNM made such a difference in Anne’s life,” said Yabroff. “We’re trying to help lower some barriers that individuals with disabilities often encounter with respect to accessing higher education, like tuition, books and housing. Many students with disabilities face an increased cost of living and reduced employment opportunities.

We want to provide support, and carry on Anne’s legacy.” ❂

If you’d like to support to the Anne B. Thomas No Bounds Scholarship, you may do so by visiting www.unmfund.org/ anne-b-thomas.

Lee L. Patchell (’93 BBA, ’95 MBA), Albuquerque, was elected to the Bosque School board of trustees as the governance committee chair and the member of executive committee. She is currently vice president of human resourses partnerships and employee relations at Presbyterian Healthcare Services.

Deb Haaland (’94 BA, ’06 JD), a U.S. Representative, was nominated to serve as Secretary of the Interior. If confirmed, Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo, will be the first Native American to serve in the post.

Lorii Rabinowitz (’94 BA) is one of three finalists for the 2021 9NEWS Leader of the Year award.

Rabinowitz is CEO of the Denver Scholarship Foundation.

Christopher L. Steffan (’99 BS), Albuquerque, Lorii Rabinowitz has joined JB Henderson Construction Company Inc. as special projects manager.

Thomas P. Trowbridge (’96 MPA), Santa Fe, N.M., won first place for “Best Daytime Newscast” in The Associated Press Television and Radio Association 2019 contest for an edition of the “KSFR MidDay Newsbreak.”

2000s Stephanie G. Becker (’03 PhD), Albuquerque, has been promoted to executive director/principal at Amy Biehl High School.

Christina L. Beppler (’06 BS), Albuquerque, was awarded the 2020 Society of Women Engineers’ Work/Life Integration Award.

An analytic chemist at Sandia National Laboratories, she was recognized for her work in establishing the Sandia Parents Group.

Denise M. Chanez (’01 BA, ’06 JD), Albuquerque, a director at the Rodey Law Firm, was presented with the State Bar President’s Award. Chanez was recognized for her service and work as Denise M. Chanez co-chair of the State Bar’s Committee on Diversity in the Legal Profession.

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Shelf Life

Books by UNM Alumni

For someone who loved the Southwest and open spaces, Joseph M. Ferguson, Jr. (’57 BA) had the perfect career. As a traveling salesman for textbook publishers, he was able to set his own itinerary and choose his own routes. “The roads I loved most were in northeastern New Mexico where I discovered — imagined rather — the ghost town of Perdido,” Ferguson writes in his preface to The Roads Around Perdido (Sunstone Press, 2019), a collection of 10 related short stories set in this lonesome country. Ferguson has a way with character and dialogue, but it is description of place where he shines. (The book was a finalist in the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards contest for fiction.) This is Ferguson describing the title subject: “Untended fields give way to unplanted prairie, and then through hills of juniper and sky the highway dips and rises, a slate-bright line to the end of the earth where clouds, new-born and luminous, have just begun to billow.”

IldikÓ Oravecz (’89 BBA, ’05 MA) has trademarked the term Tribal Abundance, a philosophy to help people achieve their personal and professional goals. She lays out her philosophy in Tribal Abundance: Living Courageously in an Uncertain World (Citrine Publishing, 2019), which has been recognized by the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the International Book Awards and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Oravecz relies on stories from her life — as a child in South Africa, an immigrant to the United States plopped down in Socorro, N.M., a coach and consultant — to help readers learn how to collaborate and connect to build personal and professional success. In short: “Listen to your gut, build a culture you believe in, and maintain a posture that promotes further enrichment.”

Joy Harjo (’76 BA), who was just named to a third term as the nation’s poet laureate, has chosen works for a comprehensive anthology of poems

by Native American writers. Harjo, a member of the Muskogee Creek tribe, is editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (W.W. Norton & Co., 2020) along with LeAnne Howe and Jennifer Elise Foerster. Harjo explains in her introduction that many people have no idea there is a single Native American poet, much less the more than 160 represented in the anthology. “Many who open the doors of this text arrive here with only stereotypes of indigenous peoples that keep indigenous peoples bound to a story in which none of us ever made it out alive,” Harjo writes. “In that story we cannot be erudite poets, scholars, and innovative creative artists.” This volume contradicts that stereotype with stirring poems by indigenous poets living and passed

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on, including a roster of writers with ties to UNM. Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday (’58 BA) offers a blessing and there are poems by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna, ’69 BA), Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna, ’75 PhD), Simon Ortiz (Acoma, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Doctor of Letters) and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo, ’81 BA, ’83 MA).

Ranger McIntyre: The Dunraven Hoard Murders (Gale, 2020) is the third installment of the Ranger McIntyre historical fiction mystery series

by James C. Work (’73 PhD). When the college fraternity brother of the son of a Denver millionaire is found dead near one abandoned gold mine in the Rocky Mountains, then another frat brother is found dead near a second mine, Rocky Mountain National Park ranger McIntyre is happy to take some time off and help an attractive investigator try to get to the bottom of the murders. Before the mystery is solved, there is yet another body: the millionaire’s son is found shot to death.

Valerie Sherer Mathes (’63 BA, ’65 MA) has built a body of academic work that centers on the American Indian Reform Movement, a series of late 19th century government policies designed to assimilate Native Americans while securing for them land ownership and civil rights.

Mathes, professor emerita of history at City College of San Francisco, had her eighth and ninth books published last year. In Charles C. Painter: The Life of an Indian Reform Advocate (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), Mathes draws a portrait of a skilled negotiator and successful advocate for assimilation policies to address the so-called “Indian problem” of his day. Born in Massachusetts in 1833, Painter was a Congregational Church pastor and professor of theology who came to the Indian Reform Movement through his association with missionary education. In 1883 he was hired by the Indian Rights Association, a nonnative group dedicated to the goal of achieving full citizenship rights for American Indians and believing that conversion to Christianity was the key to that end. Through his decades with the Indian Rights Association Painter became an important advocate for protection of Native communities and played a vital role in shaping federal Indian policy.

Mathes is the editor of Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement (University of New Mexico Press, 2020), which examines the Women’s National Indian Association, another of the associations that worked toward assimilation policies. Throughout its history — and even before its female members had a secured their own right to vote — the association established missions and missionary schools and worked to

James D. Cox (’07 BBA), Farmington, N.M., is deputy county manager of San Juan County. He previously was the county’s chief financial and strategy officer.

improve reservation conditions and relations between Native Americans and whites. Mathes also contributes several essays. Driven by a desire to reform an unjust and corrupt federal Indian Office and “a belief in the transformative power of evangelical Christianity,” Mathes writes that two Baptist women from Philadelphia — Mary Lucinda Bonny and Amelia Stone Quinton — formed the Women’s National Indian Association in the late 1870s and pressed through petitions, pamphlets and personal appeals to President Rutherford B. Hayes for policies that upheld treaty rights and contributed to permanent homes for Native peoples.

In Some Kinds of Earthly Love (Little Wing Press, 2020), Neil Flowers (’96 MA), poet, screenwriter, actor and director, collects poems of romantic love, maternal love and other things in a slim large-format volume. This is “Mother and Child”: “She stands/in the plaza/Bust shoppers/bustle round her/Slowly on/her axis turning/this way that way/rocking/the tiny blue/bundle in her arms/ She smiles and/smiles and smiles.” And from The Far Pacific: “My left knee hurts. Brown spots/ fleck the backs of my hands/In the street young women cruise by on new bikes/skirts swirl in cool breezes, slim bar legs/make me ache for days that will not return.”

Flowers presents a completely different tone and form in A Signal Through the Flames (Little Wing Press, 2020). Told as a long narrative verse, it is the story of the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 and its interruption of a crush by 15-year-old Alex on his 27-year-old teacher Rachel, a love that he carries with him through escape, a settled life in Canada and marriage.

“To all who read this book,” Charles Becknell Sr. (‘75 PhD) writes in the preface to Voices from the African-American Village (Page Publishing, 2019), “I encourage you to remember that a person over seventy is not a relic of the past, but a history book with a story to tell and testimony to be revealed.” With that, Becknell begins his testimony to the power — and humor — of the teachings of Black elders and the foundation they provide for Black culture. The subtitle of Becknell’s book is “It Takes a Village to Define a Community.” He begins with language — “black speak.” “God gave us two ears and one mouth, evidently He wanted us to do more listening than talking.” “I brought you into this world and I will take you out.” “What you do in the dark will soon come to light.” Becknell penned this short, breezy volume after reflecting that younger African-Americans might have lost out on some of the lessons the parenting figures of his generation used to form a culture. “In the transition from old to new, we lost a lot of communication strategies that assisted us in survival by giving us coping skills, endurance skills, and emotional skills to make it until time got better.”

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

Richard Charles Doty (’04 BA), Rio Rancho, N.M., retired as the Rio Rancho Fire Rescue deputy chief after 20 years of service. He will be working as operations manager for a nationwide private medical response company.

Beth Poquette Drews (’01 BA), Dallas, Texas, was awarded the Paul Ré Peace Prize Career Achievement award for establishishing Mariachi Pantera de Oro, the second middle school mariachi program in Dallas Independent School District.

Agnetha J. Gloshay (’06 BA, ’16 MPA), Albuquerque, co-founder of Native Women Lead, has joined the board of directors of the Family Independence Initiative.

Tina Muscarella Gooch (’08 JD), a lawyer with Sutin, Thayer & Browne, has been named to the Business Leadership Council of Family Friendly New Mexico.

Myrriah M. Gomez (’09 MA), Tina Muscarella Gooch Albuquerque, received the Paul Ré Peace Prize Emerging Promoters of Peace award.

She was recognized for her work with the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, a grassroots organization that brought attention to the negative effects suffered by New Mexicans after their exposure to radiation from the nuclear device detonated in 1945 at the Trinity Site.

Jesse D. Hale (’08 BA, ’13 JD), has been named counsel at Sutin, Thayer & Browne. Hale recently was re-appointed to a second term as vice chair of the Membership Committee of the Jesse D. Hale ABA’s Health Law Section. He also co-authored the New Mexico chapter of “Corporate Practice of Medicine: A 50 State Survey,” second edition, published by the American Health Lawyers Association.

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Creative Solutions in a Challenging Year

2

020 was full of challenges, ranging from a global pandemic to issues of racial injustice and a controversial U.S. presidential election. The Alumni Association (AA) and

the Alumni Relations Office (ARO) faced our own challenges of finding ways to safely continue our programs. ARO staff, Association board members, regional chapter leaders and committee chairs all flexed their creative muscles to find new and innovative ways to deliver for our alumni.

Prior to the Fall semester, we launched the AA Community Connector Series Vodcast on racial equity, inclusion and justice. The series created a safe space for honest conversations and highlighted the expertise of our university faculty. President-Elect Mike Silva and I interviewed leadership from the Division for Equity and Inclusion, African American Student Services, the Athletics Department, the Health Sciences Center and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. We concluded the series by interviewing the presidents of our Native American, Black and El Centro Alumni Chapters.

Chad Cooper

We followed up the series with our AA board members interviewing UNM’s four new deans. We hope you visit our social media pages to learn more about the deans and their initiatives at the Anderson School of Management, the School of Architecture & Planning, the College of Education & Human Sciences, and the College of Fine Arts.

The pandemic presented us with the challenge of Homecoming. We held virtual and socially distant events from a spirit yard sign campaign to a virtual Lobo Living Room with past UNM presidents. At our drive-in movie event at Balloon Fiesta Park, we crowned the Homecoming King and Queen. We concluded the week with tailgate parties in our UNM decorated driveways. The challenges were great, but our Homecoming Committee and ARO staff successfully kept us Connected by the Unexpected.

A major part of that success was the Green Chile Roast by Post. Unable to have the traditional in-person roasts, ARO staff found a new way to get their green chile to Lobos and New Mexicans around the globe. We sent approximately 3,000 jugs of green chile to all 50 states and Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom. While it initially seemed like a lost year to raise money for our regional chapter scholarships, this ended up being the most successful to date.

Our virtual Lobo Living Rooms were not limited to Homecoming. They began in the summer with football coach Danny Gonzales. After Homecoming, we featured a panel of UNM alumni and experts who discussed the science of COVID-19. We wrapped up the Fall with mental health experts who provided tips on staying healthy during the pandemic.

Lobos for Legislation continued its UNM advocacy activities, including hosting a virtual briefing for our Lobo alumni legislators. President Garnett S. Stokes and Barbara Damron and her government relations team shared UNM updates and priorities and fielded questions in preparation for the legislative session. The successful event was attended by 19 engaged and inquisitive legislators.

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Jordan Anthony Herrington (’04 BBA), Albuquerque, has been promoted by Bank of Albuquerque to senior vice president and commercial real estate manager.

President Stokes and I continued the long-standing tradition of celebrating and honoring our Lobo veterans, military service members and their families. We shared our personal military connections and honored our 228 fallen soldiers with taps and the tolling of the Alumni Memorial Chapel bell.

With COVID not allowing us to view Lobo football games in person, the AA hosted a Coast-to-Coast Virtual Watch Party for the Air Force game to show our appreciation for our team’s hard work. Alums of all ages and backgrounds around the country gathered in our favorite Lobo gear to watch the game. Alums had an opportunity to speak with Athletic Director Eddie Nuñez and Deputy Athletic Director Dave Williams. We shared stories about our experiences as students, our favorite hangouts and our love of being Lobos. Although that game did not end the way we wanted, our football team finished the season with two strong inspirational wins and a lot of promise for next year.

Finally, the AA began its major initiative of the year, the Alumni Career Network, an online community providing resources that include career mentoring, training, podcasts and more. The Network will be a resource for all Lobos to connect with each other for career guidance. The Network will also incentivize students to attend UNM knowing they will receive mentoring, internships, career training and job placement support as alumni.

We look forward to the Network being the primary resource for alumni-to-alumni hiring and mentoring regardless of the UNM school or the campus they attended. In the end, everyone’s a Lobo!

Now in 2021, the association continues to explore new opportunities and partnerships to connect alums to the University and to each other. As we begin our slow return to our normal activities, we look forward to incorporating our lessons learned and new virtual activities into the Association’s regular programs.

Let’s connect -

Chad Cooper

Alumni Association President

Theodore B. Hodoba (’00 MCRP), Veguita, N.M., has retired as manager of the Whitfield Wildlife Conservation Area after having worked there since March 2009 and volunteering since 2003.

Cynthia Maria Jarvison (’05 AAPBA, ’07 BBA), Gallup, N.M., was given the Small Business Development Center Excellence and Innovation Award by SBA New Mexico. She is currently the director of the Small Business Development Center at UNM - Gallup.

Rose Kern (’03 BUS) has published “Air to Ground 2020: A Guide for Pilots to the World of Air Traffic Control,” second edition.

Scott H. Koller (’08 BSEE), Albuquerque, has been promoted by Bridgers and Paxton Consulting Engineers to vice president. He joined the company in 2008.

Kathyleen Mary Kunkel (’03 JD), Albuquerque, retired as the New Mexico Secretary of Health.

Jackie C. Lopez-Barlow (’07 BSCHE), Abiquiu, N.M., was recently featured in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s new sevenepisode podcast “Mars Technica.” The podcast explores the scientists, technology and equiptment of the NASA 2020 Perseverance Rover mission.

Barbara A. Lynn (’01 MPA), Albuquerque, joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice.

Leonard P. Madrid (’05 BA, ’08 MFA), Albuquerque, has been working with Blackout Theatre on El Campo Santo, a podcast featuring music, comedy and stories set in New Mexican locations.

Cassandra Ruble Malone (‘04 MMU, ‘08 JD), Albuquerque, has joined Keleher & McLeod as an attorney.

Clara M. Moran (‘05 JD), Albuquerque, was appointed to the Second Judicial District Court in Bernalillo County. She has worked in the state Attorney General’s Office and the Second Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

Virginia Necochea (’01 MA, ’15 PhD), Albuquerque, was named executive director of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center.

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“You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.”

– Walt Disney

The University of New Mexico’s 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 gift to 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.

@UNMFund

UNMFoundation

@UNMFund

505-313-7600

Connect! Communicate!

Meet up with old friends and make new Ones!

STAY CONNECTED Has it been a while since you’ve connected with the UNM Alumni Association? Don’t worry, now is the perfect time to reconnect by logging into UNM Alumni Connect, our online community. Simply visit UNMAlumni.com and click Community Login in the upper right corner of the screen.

You can update your contact preferences, control your privacy settings and add your personal or professional news to Class Notes. Keeping your contact information up-to-date allows you to find and connect with fellow alumni near you and to receive information about Homecoming events, regional green chile roasts, UNM department or program news, game watch parties and more #ProudUNMAlumni opportunities.

Be sure to check out our website at UNMAlumni.com for event details and Alumni sponsored programs and groups.

The UNM Alumni Relations staff continues to provide programming and opportunities to connect virtually, and will stay up to date on the latest regulations and mandates that will allow in-person events when it is safe and responsible to in the future.

We hope you take this time to reconnect with the programs, events, adventures and benefits the UNM Alumni Association has available for Lobos like you.

FIND YOUR CHAPTER 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.

ALUMNI AWARD NOMINATIONS NOW OPEN The UNM Alumni Association celebrates the accomplishments and contributions of outstanding alumni and is currently looking for nominations for the following award categories: • Zia Award: Honors New Mexico residents with a UNM degree who have distinguished themselves in any one or more of the following categories: philanthropic endeavors, public office, service to the University, community and volunteer activities, and/or business professional fields, or educational fields.

• Lobo Award: Presented to a UNM alumnus/a who has given outstanding personal service to the University or whose career achievement reflects positively upon the university.

• Inspirational Young Alumnus Award: Recognizes significant contributions by an individual, whether through professional achievement or community service. Recipients demonstrate a commitment to excellence in post-academic life and an ongoing commitment to professional work, research, multicultural relations and/or volunteerism, while being recognized as an emerging leader.

Award recipients will be honored during Homecoming Week 2021 – Oct. 11 to 16. Visit our Alumni Awards webpage to learn more and nominate an outstanding alumnus: https://www.unmalumni.com/awards.html

Find more information about UNM Alumni Programming and Events at UNMAlumni.com.

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Trailblazer Awards The University of New Mexico Black Alumni Chapter is proud to announce the recipients of its 2020 Trailblazer Awards — New Mexico Court of Appeals Judge Shammara Henderson (’07 JD) and Trajuan Briggs (’14 BA, ’19 MS), Athletics Eligibility & Academic Specialist at the University of New Orleans. Henderson and Briggs were honored during a virtual Trailblazer Awards reception in December.

Shammara Henderson

Born and raised in Albuquerque, Henderson graduated from Valley High School and received a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy from American University in Washington, D.C. She received her J.D. from the University of New Mexico School of Law. After graduating from law school, Henderson clerked for New Mexico Supreme Court Justice Charles W. Daniels (’69 JD) before beginning joining the Second Judicial District Attorney’s Office in Albuquerque, where she prosecuted DWI/ DUI and domestic violence cases.

Henderson then served as the Associate General Counsel for the Office of Governor, advising on legal matters ranging from pardons and paroles to criminal legislation, environmental legislation and higher education.

In 2011, Henderson joined the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico, where she focused on longterm drug investigation cases and large drug trafficking organizations, as well as criminal civil rights cases. Alongside her duties as a

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In six games as a junior in a Lobo uniform, Briggs had three tackles (one solo, two assisted) and played on both special teams and defense.

After earning his B.A. in university studies and communications, Briggs served as a graduate assistant on the Lobos football team from 2016 to 2017 while working on his master’s degree. Briggs received his M.S. in Sport Administration in 2017.

While at UNM Briggs was chief of staff of the Graduate and Professional Student Association, director of the Lobo Leadership Academy, and a senior academic advisor for the College of Arts and Sciences.

After leaving UNM, Briggs worked as research and development coordinator with Trajuan Briggs Prime U in Dallas, Texas. Briggs launched Briggs graduated from Birmingham High School in Lake Balboa Calif., nationally ranked research projects and developed baseline assessments and impact measure reports as a tailback/slotback and running back, to provide analytics on the development of despite sitting out most of his senior year with programming. He also worked as a consultant an ankle injury. He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, redshirted his freshman for athletic departments and provided recommendations based on research. year and played for the California Golden In 2020, he joined the University of New Bears of the Pac-12 as a true freshman before Orleans Athletic Compliance Department transferring to UNM and making the switch as eligibility and academic specialist. from running back to linebacker.

prosecutor, she successfully promoted fairer enforcement of the laws to alleviate disparate impacts of the criminal justice system, especially racial impacts, and ensure more just punishments for low-level, nonviolent convictions.

In 2017, Henderson co-founded her own law firm, Henderson & Grohman, PC. In 2018 she joined Freedman, Boyd, Hollander, Goldberg, Urias, & Ward, PA. In early 2020, Henderson became the first African-American to sit on the New Mexico Court of Appeals. She was appointed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (’82 BUS, ’87 JD) and won a retention election later in the year.

From the Veep

T

his issue of Mirage magazine is published digitally, nearly 12 months after our lives changed so dramatically. Like you, the staff at the Alumni Relations Office has successfully taken on the changes and challenges of working from home.

We have been creating innovative programming,

Connie Beimer

Carrie D. O’Hara (’02 BSTT, ’11 MA), Albuquerque, was chosen as a 2020 Women Worth Watching winner by Profiles in Diversity Journal. The award recognizes dynamic women who are changing the workplace and world. O’Hara is a security expert and innovative instructional systems designer at Sandia National Laboratories.

Corrine M. Sanchez (’01 MA), San Ildefonso Pueblo, N.M., joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice.

continuing the support needed by our chapters, constituent groups, committees and individual alums, while still working hard to support the mission of the UNM Alumni Association to keep

Brian G. Serna (’06 MA), Santa Fe, N.M., joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice. He is the founder and CEO of Serna Solutions, which specializes in behavioral health and counseling.

all the members of our Lobo Pack connected to the University.

Every new year is as much about looking forward as it is reflecting upon the past, and as our calendars

Lucy B. Solimon (’04 BA, ’07 JD), Albuquerque, was appointed to the Second Judicial District Court in Bernalillo County.

Lucy has served as bureau chief of the Workers Compensation Administration enforcement since 2018 and as a special assistant U.S. Attorney for Laguna Pueblo.

switched into 2021, I couldn’t help but reflect upon the ways we have been able to bring our programs — from Green Chile Roast by Post to Lobo Living Rooms, the Lobo Love campaign, and Lobos for Legislation briefing to sports watch parties — into digital platforms to reach and connect with even more of our alumni across the country and even internationally.

The Alumni Association and the staff at the Alumni Relations Office have worked diligently with creativity and compassion to keep our alumni connected to the University during this otherwise difficult time, and we will continue to provide programming and opportunities to connect virtually while also keeping up to date on the latest regulations and mandates that will allow us to host in-person events safely and responsibly.

Mirage is just one of the ways to connect. Prior to this issue’s 100-percent digital delivery via email to our alumni, the Alumni Association would print and mail more than 145,000

Briana H. Zamora (’00 JD), Albuquerque, a state Court of Appeals judge, has been named to the steering committee of the Commission on Equity and Justice.

2010s Hope A. Alvarado (’19 BA), Albuquerque, joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice. Alvarado is currently a youth leader with the New Mexico Child Advocacy Network.

Noe Astorga (’15 BA, ’19 JD), a lawyer with Sutin, Thayer & Browne, has been copies to our Lobo Pack members throughout the United States. While we explained in the appointed to head the firm’s Committee Fall 2020 Mirage that going digital does reduce the cost of printing and mailing, it is of utmost on Equality. Astorga is a first-generation importance to us to keep Mirage thriving online. This new way of publishing Mirage will allow American and first-generation college and law school graduate. us to continue to share alumni stories and photos, but also allows us to publish enhanced and Dawn G. Begay (’11 BA), Albuquerque, interactive content. joined the New Mexico Council for Racial As our Pack has grown ­— now to more than 200,000 strong — so has our need to Justice. Begay serves as the Native American Affairs Coordinator for the communicate the achievements and accomplishments of alumni. We look forward to sharing City of Albuquerque’s Office of Equity your stories in new ways as Mirage grows and changes with you, too. and Inclusion.

Let’s connect -

Johana Bencomo (’18 BSN), Las Cruces, N.M., joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice. She is executive director of Comunidades en Acción y de Fé and a Las Cruces city councilor.

Frank A. Blazquez (’18 BA), Albuquerque,

Connie Beimer was awarded the Paul Ré Peace Prize Career

Interim Vice President for Alumni Relations Achievement award for his art project Barrios de Nuevo Mexico: Southwest Stories

of Vindication.

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Alumni Network Snapshots from Alumni events

UNM Alumni Association President Chad Cooper (’01 MBA) and Vice President of Alumni Relations Connie Beimer (’76 BA, ’79 MPA) hit the road with Lobo Louie and Lucy to spread Lobo Spirit for Homecoming 2020.

Amanda Armenta (’02 BBA, ’03 MBA) and Allan Armenta (’04 BFA, ’06 MBA) with their kids Cyan and Atticus are ready for Homecoming at home with all their Cherry and Silver Lobo gear. Go Lobos!

UNM Alumni Association President Chad Cooper (’01 MBA) and President-Elect Mike Silva (’95 BA) help dress up Albuquerque’s neighborhoods with Lobo yard signs for Homecoming 2020.

Lobo Louie and Lucy thank our health care heroes at UNM Hospital as part of Homecoming 2020 festivities.

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Baby Aubree, niece of Paige Klostermann, Assistant Athletic Director for Annual Giving for UNM Athletics, is dressed in her Lobo finest.

Apollonia Trujillo Gallegos (’08 BA) shows her Lobo pride at the beach in Southern California.

In Memoriam We remember alumni who recently passed away.

1930 - 1939 Billie F. Addison, ‘39 1940 - 1949 Caroline Brentari Beaumont, ‘45, ‘48 Harriet J. Whiting, ‘45, ‘50 Author E. Charette, ‘46 Cruz Carlos Castillo, ‘47 Louis Dale Kaiser, ‘48 Marc Evans Myton, ‘49 Elizabeth Ann Dargon Erickson, ‘49 Barbara Ernest, ‘49 Myra Ravel Gasser, ‘49 Gilbert E. Miranda, ‘49 Martha Jo Porter, ‘49 Lydia G. Ras-Allard, ‘49 Martin Rubenstein, ‘49 Nancy D. Shaw, ‘49 Myrl Leon Smith, ‘49 1950 - 1959 Charles Benedict Archuleta, ‘50 Robert E. Lane, ‘50 Robert Arthur Mikkelsen, ‘50, ‘70, Marilyn M. Pollock, ‘50 George M. Popelka, ‘50 William T. Van Court, ‘50 Charles Duncan Alsup, ‘51 Daryl Gilmore, ‘51 Walter L. Hyde, ‘51 James R. Lotz, ‘51 Norman A. McNew, ‘51 Wade A. Myers, ‘51 Donald G. Rieser, ‘51 Jane J. Rowe, ‘51, ‘83, Robert Warren Stark, ‘51 Joe M. Stell, ‘51 H. Tom Taylor, ‘51 Victor George Umbach, ‘51 Floyd Vance, ‘51 Richard Louis Allinger, ‘52 John Walter Hagen, ‘52 Burdette Henri Martin, ‘52 Barbara Bongard Rogers, ‘52

Gretchen L. Clatworthy, ‘53 Darrell U. Davidson, ‘53 Dorcas Knudsen Doering, ‘53 Bill Gentry, ‘53, ‘59 Malcolm J. Skove, ‘53 Noel C. Sorrell, ‘53 Donald S. Anderson, ‘54 James F. Lackey, ‘54 Gary L. Tietjen, ‘54 Frank B. Gilmer, ‘55, ‘67 Allan L. Gruer, ‘55 Claude Leonard Lewis, ‘55, ‘60 Thomas Parrish Lief, ‘55, ‘61 Louis Bernard McKee, ‘55 Helen E. Weaver, ‘55 Sarah Stringer Burkstaller, ‘56 Sylvester G. Chumley, ‘56 Glenn Roy Haste, ‘56 Betty Thorf Jack, ‘56 Peggy Lou Kirkland, ‘56, ‘62 Wayman M. Robertson, ‘56 Robert Miles Sweeney, ‘56 Bruce Robert Wood, ‘56 Richard L. Brown, ‘57, ‘65 Nancy B. Jennings, ‘57 George R. Reddy, ‘57, ‘61 Paul Olaf Scheie, ‘57 Irvine Elwin Davis, ‘58, ‘60 Charles J. Ederer, ‘58 John S. Havens, ‘58 Robin Hazen, ‘58, ‘68, Barbara Jean Holt, ‘58 Florence Ruth Marshall, ‘58 John N. Middleton, ‘58, ‘70 George J. Unterberg, ‘58 Dick Wilson, ‘58 Wycliffe V. Butler, ‘59 Lewis O. Campbell, ‘59 Edward A. Gonzales, ‘59 Virgie Nell Hale, ‘59 Patricia H. Holt, ‘59 Jack W. House, ‘59 Eleanor L. McConnell, ‘59 Sandra C. Strong Fitzgerald, ‘59

Elizabeth K. Fresquez (’14 BSN), Albuquerque, released her first single ”Ninety-Nine.” Currently working in the pre-anesthesia clinic at UNM Hospital, Fresquez still finds the time to make and perform music.

Gabriel M. Gallegos (’18 BA), Albuquerque, has been promoted to media director of Sunny505.

Aaron J. Gardner (’15 BA), Rio Rancho, N.M., was appointed permanent site manager of Casa San Ysidro: The GutiérrezMinge House in Corrales.

J.R. Giddens (’18 BLA), Albuquerque, was hired by Northern New Mexico College as new head coach of the women’s basketball program. A former NBA and UNM player, Giddens has played internationally for more than 10 years.

Astrid Carmela Gonzaga (’18 AAS), Gallup, N.M., joined a UNM-Gallup field research team funded by the National Science Foundation to advance the understanding of hydrodynamic controls on the sedimentary architecture of floodplain deposits.

Brittany A. Karnezis (’16 MA), Albuquerque, is executive director at the New Mexico Cancer Center Foundation.

Katherine E. Kleinsteuber (’13 MSN), Carlsbad, N.M., joined the Pecos Valley Physician Group’s team of health care providers and will be working at the Sandia Surgical and Vein Center.

Robert J. Johnston (’16 JD), a lawyer at Sutin, Thayer & Browne, has been appointed to the board of directors of the State Bar’s Tax Law Division. Johnston also co-authored the New Mexico chapter of Robert J. Johnston “Corporate Practice of Medicine: 50 State Survey,” second edition, published by the American Health Lawyers Association.

Colleen A. Lino (’17 BBA, ’19 MACCT), Albuquerque, has been promoted to senior tax associate at Pulakos CPAs accounting firm.

Kimball S. Sekaquaptewa (’17 MBA), Cochiti Lake, N.M., received the Women in Technology Award by the New Mexico Technology Council. Sekaquaptewa is the chief technology director at Santa Fe Indian School.

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In Memoriam

1960 - 1969 John F. Adams, ‘60 William L. Baker, ‘60 Barbara McKnight Bowser, ‘60 Jose Andres Chacon, ‘60 Charles Edward De Sutter, ‘60 Robert H. Kuehn, ‘60 Karen Quelle McKinnon, ‘60, ‘77 Gary T. Montague, ‘60 Walter L. Willis, ‘60, ‘65 William R. Bennett, ‘61 Jack B. Carlson, ‘61 Byron Gale Crego, ‘61 Elizabeth H. Doolittle, ‘61 Elizabeth Ann Galligan, ‘61, ‘95 Richard D. Jones, ‘61 Harold W. Nelson, ‘61 Karl F. Nigg, ‘61 Edward L. Patterson, ‘61, ‘63 Gordon M. Purslow, ‘61 Elizabeth Thomas, ‘61 George Lawrence Adkins, ‘62 Sidney B. Gasser, ‘62 James A. Gosse, ‘62 Patsy L. Rodgers, ‘62, ‘69 Marvin Chester Weber, ‘62 Lee A. Woodward, ‘62 Charles A. Bandoian, ‘63, ‘69 Ralph B. Clark, ‘63 Sajjad H. Durrani, ‘63 Dennis L. Mangan, ‘63, ‘71 William I. Norwood, ‘63 Ernie Simpson, ‘63, ‘68, David M. del Castillo, ‘64, ‘67 Nelson W. Eskridge, ‘64 Michael M. Simon, ‘64 Fred W. Wellborn, ‘64 Peter M. Welsh, ‘64 Patricia C. Wilding-White, ‘64 Grace L. Colvin, ‘65 Julia Anne Harris, ‘65, ‘70 Richard G. Hay, ‘65, ‘67 Patricia Diane King, ‘65

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Paul Daniel Lackey, ‘65, ‘73 Jean M. Marshall, ‘65 Paul Gerald Meyer, ‘65 John Marcus Nielson, ‘65 Veronica Reed, ‘65 William F. Riordan, ‘65, ‘68 Charles Eugene Shipley, ‘65, ‘68 Arthur John Bennett, ‘66 Frederick Gaudenz Broell, ‘66, ‘69, ‘70 Donald A. Jelinek, ‘66 Lynn Tarleton Ritchie, ‘66, ‘76 Ausencio Romero, ‘66, ‘69 Added Marcus A. Boyer, ‘67 James Olaf Halvorson, ‘67 Daniel T. Jennings, ‘67, ‘73 Patricia Winter Mendius, ‘67 Virginia A. Miles, ‘67 Keith D. Neel, ‘67, ‘67 Louis Rodriguez, ‘67 Jesus Carruth Sandoval, ‘67 Joseph P. Sekot, ‘67 Benjamin M. Butler, ‘68 William G. Delano, ‘68 Karen J. Fisher, ‘68 Calvin E. Guymon, ‘68 William Rathberger, ‘68 Alain Michel Serieyssol, ‘68, ‘69 Sylvia Jean Sisson, ‘68 Billy Joe Thorne, ‘68 Terry L. Booth, ‘69 James J. Cox, ‘69 Elizabeth A. Crain, ‘69 Dale W. Foster, ‘69 Jay Daniel Hertz, ‘69 Johanna Kennedy Major, ‘69 Caryl Arden Mitchell, ‘69 William Allen Rathgeber, ‘69 Lauralea Ann Stephens, ‘69 Dee C. Whitlock, ‘69 1970 - 1979 Maxine Cowton, ‘70 Rhonda Joan Crume McCarley, ‘70, ‘76 William Lee Hatch, ‘70

Richard Wright Irvin, ‘70 Del Paul Jack, ‘70 William E. Kraus, ‘70, ‘71 Edward Leroy Lane, ‘70 Percy Larranaga, ‘70, ‘78 Carlos Brazil Ramirez, ‘70 James R. Sawtelle, ‘70 Knollie Lee Sell, ‘70 Suzann I. Trout, ‘70, ‘76 Susan C. Wheeler, ‘70 John Russell Callan, ‘71 Charles E. Hughes, ‘71 Ella Onetta Labrier, ‘71 Bill Lord, ‘71 James Terrell Ray, ‘71 Kenneth Alois Sabisch, ‘71 Thomas Arnold Tabet, ‘71 Milton Maurice Brewer, ‘72 Jerry Lynn Buckner, ‘72 Clayton Fisher Childs, ‘72, ‘76 Robert J. Hodge, ‘72 Donald Lee Kurle, ‘72 Roberto Martinez, ‘72 Jim Metheny, ‘72 Mary Katherine Cornell, ‘73 Julie Cullender Weaks Gutierrez, ‘73, ‘93 Dora M. Juarez, ‘73 Lillian E. Martin, ‘73 Charles Edgar Merritt, ‘73 David Lee Otero, ‘73 Cleve Bruce Pillifant, ‘73 Joe Bill Scrivner, ‘73, ‘81, Donald Ray Standiford, ‘73 Roberta Wellems, ‘73 Walter B. Henderson, ‘74, ‘76 George E. Kennedy, ‘74, ‘78 Lawrence D. Larkin, ‘74 David James McNally, ‘74 Kirk Gregory Williams, ‘74 George Austin-Martin, ‘75, ‘76 William B. Bentley, ‘75 Emily Bunting, ‘75 Mart Cooper Hanna, ‘75 Norman George Johnson, ‘75

In Memoriam Suzanne Leslie Kupferer, ‘75 Ronald Woodrow Light, ‘75, ‘77, ‘79 Maebah B. Morris, ‘75, ‘79, John T. Reilly, ‘75 Roland Kent Sanchez, ‘75 Thomas E. Singleton, ‘75 Jeannine H. Encinias, ‘76, ‘81 Susan Elaine Haley, ‘76 Deborah Zamora Kalmus, ‘76 Anita Aufill Kelly, ‘76 Lydia Rede Madrid, ‘76 Anna Maria Delfinia Padilla, ‘76 Mark David Rieb, ‘76, ‘80 Howard Yee, ‘76 Susan Carol Doering, ‘77 Jill Leslie Furst, ‘77 Albert Castulo Lujan, ‘77, ‘81 Deborah Ann White, ‘77 Patricia K. Archibeck, ‘78, ‘91 Thomas E. Dinkins, ‘78 Mary Katherine Ann Gallegos, ‘78 Roger Gene Gonzales, ‘78 Donna Kalb Herbst, ‘78, ‘92 Sara Beth McComas, ‘78 Doris Elaine Shorey, ‘78, ‘79 Katrina M. Space, ‘78 Anne C. Bullock, ‘79 Ronald Scott Chinberg, ‘79 Mitchell S. Fletcher, ‘79 John Francis Gilligan, ‘79 George Franklin Meade, ‘79

Carol Anne Shelton, ‘79 1980 - 1989 Clifton L. Brashar, ‘80 Christine Anne Hemingway, ‘80 J. Patrick Josey, ‘80 Carolyn Swain Palmer, ‘80 Barbara A. Sanchez, ‘80, ‘84 Larry D. Bush, ‘81 Christopher James Clark, ‘81 Donald C. Cole, ‘81 Dorothy Dwyre Grosvenor, ‘81 Charlean B. Raymond, ‘81 David Neil Robertson, ‘81 Olivia T. Romero, ‘81 John R. Witcofsky, ‘81 Edmund L. Ciccarello, ‘82 Jeanne Bennett Dailey, ‘82 Tong-Hai Hu, ‘82 Linda Raquel Morse, ‘82 Judith Ann Rogala, ‘82 Eloisa Bergere Brown, ‘83 Felipe Antonio Chavez, ‘83 Gloria Whitney Crane, ‘83 Ann Marie Dumas, ‘83 Gilbert Michael Martinez, ‘83 Nina R. Santiago, ‘83 James P. Baiamonte, ‘84 Joseph L. Lifke, ‘84 Candy Lea Sapier, ‘84 Diane Marie Tapia, ‘84

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

Alison K. Goodwin (’18 JD) a lawyer at Sutin, Thayer & Browne, has been appointed the Young Lawyer Division Liaison to the State Bar of New Mexico’s Health Law Section. Her term runs through December 2021.

Alison K. Goodwin

Rosswell Radoslaw Sinclair (’20 BBA), Albuquerque, won the 79th Albuquerque Men’s City Golf Championship. Sinclair finished the 54-hole event at 12-under 204.

Martina Terri Smiley (’19 AS), Window Rock, Ariz., joined a UNM-Gallup field research team funded by the National Science Foundation to advance the understanding of hydrodynamic controls on the sedimentary architecture of floodplain deposits.

Jason D. Sterns (’11 BBA), Albuquerque, has been promoted to senior auditor at Pulakos CPAs accounting firm.

Andres D. Trujillo (’10 BA), Albuquerque, was named executive director of New Mexico Games, an annual amateur athletic competition.

Phillip N. Walck (’11 BBA, ’19 MBA), Albuquerque, has been promoted to senior tax accountant at Pulakos CPAs accounting firm.

2020s Sabrina Hernandez (’20 JD) has joined Foulston Siefkin LLP, the largest Kansas-based law firm, as an associate in Foulston’s litigation practice group.

Jared P. Lucero (’20 BA), Santa Fe, Sabrina Hernandez N.M., co- founded YOUnited Threads, a charitable bracelet business dedicating all profits to the American Red Cross initiative to fight COVID-19.

Alexis M. Rael (’20 BBA), Santa Fe, N.M., joined the New Mexico Council for Racial Justice. Rael is pursuing a master‘s in business administration at UNM.

the email version by sending a request to alumni@unm.edu.

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In Memoriam David Owen Taylor, ‘84 Esther Marie Archibeque, ‘85 William Harvey Broughton, ‘85, ‘88, ‘94 Lois E. Detwiler, ‘85 Cassandra Janette Gulley, ‘85 Bill Kosta Hanges, ‘85 Phyllis A. Patterson, ‘85 Richard Michael Barr, ‘86 Eliane Van Stichel, ‘86 Maria Evette Candelaria, ‘87, ‘91 Rose Martinez, ‘87 Louis Arthur Redmond, ‘87, ‘89 Claude Hillary Muller, ‘88 Grace Sandoval Pedro, ‘88 Lane Burgess Theiler, ‘88 Kathryn Lynn Bogren, ‘89 Joyce Marion Connors, ‘89 Britten Finney, ‘89 Steven James Tullar, ‘89 1990 - 1999 Roberta Josephine Arnold, ‘90, ‘94 Gilbert Gene Cadman, ‘90 Richard Wayne Martinez, ‘90 Sarah Leigh Vidal, ‘90 Jacqueline Kay Walters, ‘90 Patricia A Ortiz Brower, ‘91, ‘95 Mary E. Harrison, ‘91 Katherine Louise Schlapp, ‘91 David George Hanna, ‘92 Derrick P. Joe, ‘92, ‘93, Elizabeth S. Reil, ‘92 Rick Gregg Sherwood, ‘92, ‘07 Jack Bateman, ‘93 Larry M. Bishop, ‘93, ‘95, Chris Peter Johnson, ‘93 Ryan Ernest Pemble, ‘93, ‘99 Barbara L. Johnston, ‘94 Louis B. Ashley, ‘95 Lester Leon Bleil, ‘95 Taleah R. Hartman, ‘95 Joseph Torsiello, ‘95 Paul Arthur Barrientos, ‘96 Beverly Alice Gross, ‘96

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MIRAGE MAGAZINE

John Gordon Odell, ‘96, ‘00 Eric Charles Smith, ‘96 Jasson Christopher Cwiekalo, ‘97 Nancy Elizabeth Rogers, ‘97 Kelvin Michael Scarborough, ‘97 Valery Lee Blood, ‘98 Keith Louis Buchanan, ‘98 Serafina Fellin, ‘98 Sharon Anne Ford, ‘98 Jane Nell King, ‘98 Wayne Thomas Parks, ‘98 Diann Elizabeth Pino, ‘98 Beverly Mitchell Allred, ‘99 Allison Patricia Anderson, ‘99 Urszula Jolanta Biela, ‘99 2000 - 2009 Bethany Catherine Reeb-Sutherland, ‘00, ‘03, ‘06 Sarah M. Moody, ‘01 Allison Moule, ‘01 Charlene G. Struck, ‘01, ‘03, Christin Kathleen Kennedy, ‘02 Miranda Sanchez, ‘02, ‘11, Lance Bennett Stillwell, ‘02 Emily A. Coleman, ‘04 Nicholas Jason Miera, ‘04 Steve Munoz, ‘04 Nicole Lee Tipton, ‘04 Alexander B. Turtletaub, ‘04 Ryan David Cunningham, ‘05 Kendra R. Morgan, ‘05 Maynard David Becenti, ’06, ‘09 John William Joseph Charles, ‘06 Janet Langston Schoen, ‘06 Stacie N. Cruz, ‘07, ‘13 Shayla Spolidoro, ‘07, ‘11 Claresia Begay, ‘08 Lynsey A. Horcasitas, ‘08 Victoria T. Sype, ‘08, ‘09 Marilyn J. De Palma, ‘09 2010 - 2019 Paula A. Ferguson, ‘10

Hannah Helen Philbrick, ‘10 Kermit A. Yonnie, ‘10, ‘15, Theodore Raymond Bolstad, ‘11 Manuelita I. Chapman, ‘12, ‘17 Jonathan M. Lucero, ‘12 Michael E. Watts, ‘12 Michael Francis Brett, ‘15 Edward Jude Davis, ‘16 Bobby Dale Gibbs, ‘16 Veronica Iturralde, ‘16 Adrienne Kelsey Lawless, ‘16 Benjamin Michael Smith, ‘16 Rebecca S. Cox, ‘17 Shirley Ann Ashley, ‘18 PENDING GRADUATE Jacqueline Ann Smith FACULTY AND STAFF Bob Anderson Shirley Archunde Ronald Eugene Blood William Harvey Broughton Edwin H. Caplan Hannah Colton Richard V. Croghan Michael Davidson Raphael J. DeHoratius Patricia Kathryne Fowler Stephen L. Gregg Richard Irvin Niles Ragner Johnson David H. Munger Paul Platero Dr. Patrick G. Quinn Harold V. Rhodes Tom Saunders OTHER ALUMNI Wilma Jean Nash

My

ALUMNI STORY

I was stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base when I took my first college course via the base education center. At the time I wasn't sure if college was the best route for me. But shortly after completing my Air Force tenure I got in touch with the Veteran & Military Resource Center at The University of New Mexico. The help and resources they provided gave me confidence to start my journey at UNM. Initially, I wasn't sure which degree program to follow. I have a passion for creating music, but I also wanted to cast a wide net for job opportunities. I decided on a degree that would make me marketable for an “everyday job” while providing me with the knowledge and skill set essential to marketing myself as an artist: Enter the Marketing Management BBA. While studying at the Anderson School of Management, I learned about the ins and outs of market research, applying marketing strategies and marketing management.

®

Since graduating, my degree has provided me with the opportunity to work with disabled veterans. Additionally, I’ve applied the marketing skills I acquired as a student to pursue my passion as an artist, such as networking, social media marketing and designing/ promoting my own apparel. Although I recently moved to Dallas, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to experience the culture of UNM as part of my story. I very much look forward to continuing to utilize my education to establish myself as an artist/entrepreneur.

You can hear my music on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and all other streaming platforms; just search ‘Griff Lamar.’ You can also find me on Instagram @grifflamar22.

Everyone’s a LOBO! Griff Lamar (’17 BBA)

Stay in touch with your Alumni Association at UNMAlumni.com. Click on “Connect.”

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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

HOME COMING October 11 - 16, 2021

www.unmalumni.com/homecoming