Five professors have been promoted to the rank of University of New Mexico distinguished professor. Distinguished professors are individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievements and are nationally and internationally renowned as scholars.
C. Jeffrey Brinker, professor, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering, School of Engineering, joined the UNM faculty in 1999.
Patricia Crown, professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts & Sciences, joined the UNM faculty in 1993.
Suleiman Kassicieh, ASM Endowed Chair in Economic Development and Regents’ Professor of Management of Technology, Anderson School of Management, joined the UNM faculty in 1981.
Barbara McCrady, professor of psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences, and director of the Center on Alcoholism, Substance Abuse, and Addictions, has been at UNM since 2007.
Gerald Vizenor, professor, American Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences, is a professor emeritus from the University of California, Berkeley.
The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) honored Michelle Steinauer, a research assistant professor in the University of New Mexico biology department, with the Young Investigator Award at the organization’s annual conference in Philadelphia. Steinauer was one of five recipients recognized with the prestigious award.
The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene is the principal organization in the United States representing scientists, clinicians and others with interests in the prevention and control of tropical diseases through research and education.
Steinauer, who has been at UNM for three years, was recognized for her research on schistosome parasites, a flat worm that causes the disease, schistosomiasis, in humans.
English professor Gary Harrison is the 2008 Presidential Teaching Fellow, the highest teaching honor the UNM bestows.
Harrison began teaching at the university in the fall of 1987, after he graduated from Stanford University with a Ph.D. in English. His specialty is British Romanticism and Literary Theory. Among his many achievements, he said the most formative experience in his teaching career came when he taught an innovative two-semester course in World Literature with four seasoned, creative colleagues. As part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant they developed what is now the survey of world literatures sequence in the Department of English.
Krause is an associate professor of economics at UNM and has taught everything from Freshman Learning Communities to introductory macroeconomics classes with nearly 200 students. She taught upper division and graduate seminars and teaches teachers about economics through the Albuquerque Teachers’ Institute.
Krause is a behavioral economist and she considers what people do when faced with economic decisions that don’t have obvious “right” answers. Krause frequently tells her students to write about their own economic behavior and the economic choices they observe around them.
Her drive to persuade her students to question and reach conclusions and judgments helped make her a UNM 2008 Outstanding Teacher of the Year.
Associate Professor of English, Gregory Martin, was hired at UNM to implement a creative nonfiction concentration within the creative writing program and his students, who are all required to submit a manuscript for publication in a magazine, have been published in literary journals, in anthologies, and had their work read aloud on National Public Radio. Martin mentors student writers with an emphasis on the process of revision and peer review.
Martin has already received the Keleher Award for Outstanding Assistant Professor of English and the Gunter Starkey Teaching Award from UNM’s College of Arts and Sciences. He also wrote “Mountain City”, a memoir of the life of a town of thirty-three people in remote northeastern Nevada, which received a Washington State Book Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Sam Truett, associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, was selected for inclusion in the History News Network’s Top Young Historians feature. Truett has taught at UNM since 1998. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Finland and a Mellon Research Fellow at the Huntington Library.
John Grey, assistant professor of chemistry, was named the recipient of a 2008 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enrichment Award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities. Grey plans to use the money from the award to continue his research in the field of photovoltaics.
Grey, who is new to UNM, said his research explores the interdependence between nano-scale structure and the outcomes of charge generation and transport processes, which will aid materials scientists in the rational design of new synthetic and processing strategies.
He plans to work with students to incorporate new molecular level characterization techniques in order to establish correlations between local structure and functionality in promising photovoltaic strategies. Ultimately he hopes to improve the efficiency and lifetime of materials that are used in photovoltaic devices.
Paul Andrew Hutton, Distinguished Professor in the history department received the Award of Merit from the Western History Association. The award is given to an individual in recognition of outstanding service to the field of western history and to the Western History Association.