Distinguished professors are individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievements and are nationally and internationally renowned as scholars.

For a complete list of UNM’s Distinguished Professors, visit: Distinguished Professors

2008 - UNM Promotes Three A&S Faculty Members to Rank of Distinguished Professor

Patricia Crown, professor, Anthropology
Barbara McCrady, professor, Psychology
Gerald Vizenor, professor, American Studies

Interim Provost Viola Florez said, “The rank of Distinguished Professor is the highest faculty rank at the university. It is reserved for a very small number of individuals who have made major scholarly contributions to their fields.

This year we had a very strong group of nominees, and we are proud of the accomplishments of each of them. The new awardees join a very select group of our faculty.”   [More] 

The 2005-2006 inductees are:

Joan Bybee
Bybee's work in the field of linguistics built a foundation for scholarly writing in the areas of linguistic typology, morphology, language change and semantics. In 2004, she was named president of the Linguistic Society of America as well as UNM annual research lecturer. She was selected as a Regent's professor in 1996. Bybee recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo.

F. Chris Garcia
Garcia's research on Latino political attitudes has earned national and international recognition and contributed to the reputation of UNM's study of Latino culture in the U.S. Garcia served as the 17th UNM president in 2002-2003. Most recently, he was awarded the Franklin J. Goodnow Award for Distinguished Service from the American Political Science Association.

Nitant Kenkre
Kenkre has made profound, insightful and seminal contributions to the field of theoretical condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics. He was elected fellow of the American Physical Society in 1998 and is this year's UNM annual research lecturer. Kenkre is the founding director of the Consortium of the Americas for Interdisciplinary Science.

Robert T. Paine, Jr.
Paine devotes his attention to several topics that often intersect with different areas of chemistry, including analytical applications, organic synthesis and spectroscopic/structural characterization and materials science. Paine was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served as the 40th UNM annual research lecturer in 1995.

Gary Scharnhorst
Scharnhorst redefined 19th century American literature by discovering and publishing previously unnoted texts. He has become an international authority on Bret Harte, friend and colleague of Mark Twain. He illuminates our understanding of canonical writers by detailing their interactions with so-called marginal writers of the day. He authored eight books, served as president of the Western Literature Association and received four Fulbright awards.

Lawrence Guy Straus
Straus, a Paleolithic archeologist, works in Western Europe, including Spain, France, Portugal and Belgium. He has been editor of UNM's Journal of Anthropological Research since 1995 and a member of the U.S. National Committee for INQUA (the International Union for Quaternary Research) and U.S. representative to the UISPP (International Union of Prehistoric & Protohistoric Sciences) Commission on the Upper Paleolithic of Europe.