Contact: Julia E. Fulghum, 277-5431 Media contact: Michael Padilla, 277-1816

Aug. 28, 2002 JULIA E. FULGHUM SELECTED CHAIR OF UNM’s CHEMICAL AND NUCLEAR ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT Julia E. Fulghum has been named chair of the University of New Mexico Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Department. School of Engineering (SOE) Dean Joe Cecchi said Fulghum has the honor of serving as the SOE’s first female department chair. Fulghum replaces Norman F. Roderick, who has served as interim chair since November 2000. Fulghum will oversee seven staff and 17 faculty. Currently, there are 67 undergraduates and 75 graduate students in the department. Fulghum, who will also be a professor in the department, said her primary goal as new chair, a five-year appointment, is to increase the visibility of the department nationally and internationally and continue to improve its relationship with Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. “We have a really strong research program here,” she said. “The department has outstanding people and we need to continue to improve by attracting the best students and faculty.” The Department is currently in the process of hiring a Nuclear Engineering faculty member. She said that she would like to increase the department’s diversity through both faculty hiring and student recruiting. Cecchi said Fulghum has great leadership skills. “An interesting point is that her research fits beautifully into our well-developed small-scale materials program, particularly what is going on in the Center for Micro-Engineered Materials,” Cecchi said. Fulghum’s research interests include materials characterization with an emphasis on multi-technique correlation and multivariate analysis for non-destructive evaluation of heterogeneous samples. Fulghum was a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at Kent State University from August 1989 to August 2002 and Honors College faculty member from January 2000 to August 2002 at KSU. From August 1997 to July 2000 she served as graduate coordinator for the Chemistry Department at KSU. She served as a visiting scientist at National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. from September 1996 to June 1997. Other positions at KSU include adjunct professor in the chemical physics interdisciplinary program; graduate coordinator, in the Chemistry Department. She was a postdoctoral associate in the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina; and a postdoctoral associate and Instructor, Chemistry Department, University of North Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in analytical chemistry in 1987 from the University of North Carolina, her master’s degree in analytical chemistry in 1983 from Cornell University and bachelor’s in chemistry with highest honors in 1981 from the University of North Carolina. She received the distinguished teacher award from the College of Arts and Sciences at KSU in 2001 and was named outstanding faculty mentor in the Teaching Scholars Program at KSU in 2001. She serves as chair of the Advisory Board of the National ESCA and Surface Analysis Center for Biomedical Problems (NESAC/BIO). She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Surface and Interface Analysis and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for The Journal Of Electron Spectroscopy and Related Phenomena. In addition, she is active in the Applied Surface Science Division of the American Vacuum Society where she has served as chair, program chair and member-at-large. Her research is funded by NSF and various industrial sources. Her research group, including one postdoctoral research assistant and three or four Ph.D. students, will be moving to UNM, along with their equipment, from Kent State in December. She and her husband, Steve Cabaniss, a chemistry professor in the UNM Chemistry Department, have one son, Drew, 9. ###

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