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The University of New Mexico

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Media Contact: Karen Wentworth (505) 277-5627
kwent2@unm.edu

February 19, 2007

UNM Physics Professor Appointed to Lead Institute for Advanced Studies

Robert Duncan is the director of the newly-founded New Mexico Consortium’s Institute for Advanced Studies. Duncan is a professor of physics and astronomy, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UNM and a member of the physics faculty at Caltech. He served as the Gordon and Betty Moore Distinguished Scholar at Caltech, and as the associate dean for research at the UNM College of Arts and Sciences, before becoming the founding director of the IAS.

The New Mexico Consortium is a collaboration involving UNM, New Mexico State University, New Mexico Tech and Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the managing entity of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The purpose is to use the joint research capabilities of these institutions for mutually beneficial research and educational projects. The Leadership Council of the IAS consists of outstanding scientists with substantial administrative experience from each of these four institutions.

Duncan says the Institute for Advanced Studies has recently submitted a grant proposal to manage and operate one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s new Bioenergy Research Centers in collaboration with LANL.

In addition the IAS has joined with the Santa Fe Institute and the Center for Nonlinear Studies at LANL to co-sponsor the Grand Challenges in Neural Computing Conference in Santa Fe this week.

Duncan earned his doctorate in low temperature condensed-matter physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1988. Before jointing UNM in 1996, Duncan was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in the development of quantum standards of voltage and resistance, and in the development of cryogenic remote sensing systems.

He is a Fellow of the American Physics Society. Duncan served as a flight principal investigator in NASA’s Microgravity Fundamental Physics Program prior to the recent restructuring of NASA to develop a human flight program to Mars.

“We’re delighted by the close support of Los Alamos National Lab in this, our first year of existence,” says Duncan. “Los Alamos has created centers of scientific and technical expertise that are some of the very best in the world, and being able to team with them will be very advantageous to all the institutions in the New Mexico Consortium.”

More information about the New Mexico Consortium’s Institute for Advanced Study can be found at http://www.nmcias.org

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