Mandibula

Towards the end of the last glacial period about 19,000 years ago, a young adult died in North­ern Spain.  It is not known whether El Miron Cave was the orig­i­nal place of death, but at some point the bones were stained with red ochre, pos­si­bly placed in an ani­mal hide bag, and interred in a pro­tected place within this large cave in north­ern Spain.

Last midsummer’s eve, UNM Dis­tin­guished Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­ogy Lawrence G. Straus and his col­league from the Uni­ver­sity of Cantabria (San­tander) Pro­fes­sor Manuel González-Morales found a par­tial human skele­ton when they were exca­vat­ing just behind a huge block of stone that had fallen from the ceil­ing of El Mirón Cave not too long before the per­son died.   

The sur­face of the stone block fac­ing the cave mouth was engraved by the inhab­i­tants.  The back sur­face of the block, clos­est to the bur­ial was stained with ochre.  The arche­ol­o­gists have not yet been able to exca­vate the area com­pletely, but are excited about their ini­tial discoveries.

  [Full article]  

Bison Tooth

Imagine find­ing evidence of one of the first human groups known to have traveled through the middle Rio Grande Valley in the Southwestern United States.  That’s what students in Anthropology 375/575 did this summer as they excavated a Folsom site on a mesa west of Albuquerque. It was named Deann’s site after Deann Muller, the student who found it during a survey of the area in 2001.

This is the second summer students have worked at the site, which Research Associate Professor of Anthropology Bruce Huckell describes as a short-term campsite occupied on the heels of a successful bison kill.

The students found flakes from the stone tools the Folsom people shaped at the site, broken tools, tooth enamel and a few small pieces of bone from bison that were their prey.  Huckell is leading the field school, which teaches students the cor­rect sci­en­tific tech­niques for exca­vat­ing and documenting a site and his enthusiasm is catching as he puts the backbreaking effort of digging for artifacts into a historical context.

  [Full article]  

Dean Brenda J. Claiborne is pleased to announce this year's recipients of the College of Arts & Sciences Award for Teaching Excellence. 

The faculty awardees are Timothy Graham, Professor of History; Michael Rocca, Assistant Professor of Political Science; and Derek Hamilton, Assistant Professor of Psychology. 

The graduate student awardees are Iliana Rucker, Department of Communication and Journalism, and Leah
Sneider, Department of English. 

The members of the Award Committee judged their teaching contributions excellent in their breadth, the quality of their classroom performances, the supervision of student research, and abilities in integrating their research and scholarship into their teaching.  The entire College joins in congratulating them on their teaching accomplishments.

Hutton to Receive His 6th Western Heritage Award

Paul Hutton, Distinguished Professor of History, receives a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum at a black-tie gala, Saturday April 17, in Oklahoma City. The award is for Hutton's on-camera commentary and narration of the program "The Real Wyatt Earp," an episode of the History Channel six-part series "Cowboys and Outlaws" that aired last November.

This is Hutton's sixth Western Heritage Award, but his previous wins have been for his writing. This award, for acting, reflects the more than 200 television programs Hutton has appeared in since the mid-1990s on a wide variety of networks including CBS, NBC, PBS, BBC, TBS, A&E, Disney, the Travel Channel, TNN, C-Span Book TV, Discovery and the History Channel. [More] 

Maxwell Museum Offers Program on How Traditional Foods Interact with Culture and Health

Gary Paul Nabhan will present a lecture on “How Traditional Foods Interact with our Inheritance, Culture and Health on Friday, April 30, 7 p.m. at the Maxwell Museum. On Saturday, May 1 at 1 p.m. Lisa Huckell will speak on “Harvesting the Past: Wild Plant Foods and Their Role in Contemporary Culture.” At 2 p.m. on May 1, there will be a wild plant sampling.

The Food and Life series is a two part program that explores the cultural significance of traditional foodways and the archaeological, historic, and modern uses of regional botanical foods in health applications. The series will present keynote speaker Gary Paul Nabhan, an Arab-American writer, lecturer, food and farming advocate, rural life-ways folklorist, and conservationist whose work has long been rooted in the U.S./Mexico borderlands region. [More] 

If past records regarding periods of warming and cooling climate are an accurate indication of weather patterns, then the southwestern United States is likely headed into a period of severe long-term drought say researchers at the University of New Mexico in new research published in the February issue of Nature Geoscience. Variable winter moisture, or the lack thereof in the southwestern United States, is linked to rapid glacial climate shifts say Yemane Asmerom and Victor Polyak, researchers in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at the University of New Mexico. [More] 

Optical refrigeration breakthrough promises a novel alternative to bulky mechanical cryo-coolers

Researchers at the University of New Mexico have established a new low in temperature cooling through laser cooling of solids to cryogenic temperatures. Under an AFOSR, MURI grant, a team led by UNM Professor, Mansoor Sheik-Bahae, created the first-ever all-solid-state cryocooler (temperatures that can only be obtained by liquefying gases and mechanical refrigerators) that can be used for a variety of applications ranging from cooling infrared sensors to superconducting electronics.

This work was just published in the January (online) issue of the Journal of Nature-Photonics. To view the paper visit: Laser cooling of solids to cryogenic temperatures.

Graduate students Denis Seletskiy and Seth Melgaard designed and performed the experiments at UNM's Department of Physics and Astronomy in collaboration with researchers from Los Alamos National Lab and the University of Pisa, Italy. [More] 

The American Studies Department presents a series of lectures beginning Monday, Feb. 22, 2-3:30 p.m. in Ortega Hall 335, when Jennifer Denetdale, associate professor of history, Northern Arizona University, presents, "Indigenous Women Naming Violence: Colonialism, Native Nations and Globalization."

On Thursday, Feb. 25, 2-3:30 p.m. in the History Common Room in Mesa Vista Hall, Margo Tamez, Ph.D. candidate in American Studies, Washington State University, presents, “Recovering Lipan Apache Women's Histories, Laws, and Lands in El Calaboz Ranchería, Texas-Mexico Border.”’ More...

Anthropology Colloquium Explores Coping Strategies among the San of South Africa

Robert Hitchcock, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University will talk on “Death of Myth, Environmental Change, Politics, and Coping Strategies among the San of Southern Africa on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 4 p.m. in the Hibben Center Room 105. More...

The Center for the Southwest announces the sixth Richard W. Etulain Lecture in History.

Dr. Jesse Alemán, Associate Professor of English, will present the 2010 Richard W. Etulain Lecture, “From Union Officers to Cuban Rebels: The Story of the Brothers Cavada and their American Civil Wars,” on Thursday, February 18, at 5:30 p.m. in the UNM Student Union Building, Lobo A and B. [More] 

Mary Anne Nelson

Biology Professor Mary Anne Nelson will be honored today by the White House and President Barack Obama as one of 22 individuals and organizations to receive the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM).

Colleagues, administrators, and students from their home institutions nominate candidates for the Presidential Mentoring Award. [More] 

Anthropology Lecture on Chaco Canyon and the Evolution of Pilgrimage Centers

John Kantner from the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe will speak on “Chaco Canyon: Costly Signaling and the Evolution of Pilgrimage Centers” at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 4, in the Hibben Center Room 105 on UNM’s main campus. The lecture is free and the public is welcome.

Kantner will consider how the practice of pilgrimage is a costly signal of religious adherence since pilgrims typically engage in a variety of costly behaviors that affirm their commitment to the religion while operating as a eterrent to cheaters. At the same time, the pilgrimage center itself is a separate but interrelated costly signal of power.

Kantner proposes that both costly signals operate side-by-side to promote cooperation and differentiation simultaneously, qualities that mark many middle range societies. He will use the 11th century pilgrimage center of Chaco Canyon as a case study.

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

Keith Prufer

In the 10th century, the Mayan people living in southern Belize left the area, and no one moved back in significant numbers for 500 years. UNM Assistant Professor of Anthropology Keith Prufer wants to know why. Prufer is working with Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Yemane Asmerom and researchers at the University of Oregon and in Switzerland to reconstruct a timeline of environmental change spanning the last 4,000 years in Belize.

He recently returned from setting up data collection equipment at a cave near Uxbenká, Belize. Asmerom is analyzing isotope information contained in speleothems – mineral deposits formed in caves – to build a climate record in his Radiogenic Isotope Laboratory in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

He said preliminary results indicate that the first samples are ideally suited for high precision dating and can be calibrated to specific dates within five or ten years. He believes he will have initial results within the next few months.

Vera Norwood

Vera Norwood, professor, American Studies, recently received the Mary C. Turpie Award, an award named for the late Mary C. Turpie, co-founder, chair, and for many years, the guiding force behind the American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. The award is given by the American Studies Association.

Established in 1993, the award goes annually to a member of the profession who has demonstrated outstanding abilities and achievement in American Studies teaching, advising and program development at the local or regional level.

Norwood, at UNM since 1992, chaired the program from 1993-1999. Bill Mullen, director of American Studies at Purdue, said, “Under her leadership, the University of New Mexico has grown to become a regional and national leader in American Studies. Professor Norwood has helped link geographical and intellectual specificity in both the UNM American Studies program, and Southwest studies more broadly. In many ways, the current place-bound field of American Studies, which held its 2008 meeting in Albuquerque, has followed suit.”   [More]

Helen Wearing

“There’s been a lot of interest in the United States and other countries about the resurgence of whooping cough cases,” said Helen Wearing, UNM biology and mathematics assistant professor and lead author on the paper published Oct. 23 in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens. “Using mathematical models, we discovered that immunity from natural infection can be long lasting. ”

"This is surprising because clinical epidemiologists currently believe the duration of pertussis immunity is somewhere between four and 20 years," said UM’s Pejman Rohani, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Several explanations have been proposed for the surprising increase in cases, and one leading idea is that the immunity enjoyed by vaccinated or previously exposed people is simply wearing off. It's been documented that in some individuals immunity has waned over time, but the exact details of how long protection typically lasts and how its waning affects disease transmission have not been clear.

Wearing and Rohani took a mathematical approach, using models to explore various scenarios and comparing the predictions generated by those models to data on whooping cough incidence. The researchers constructed two models, a basic model and an immune-boosting model, with different assumptions about what happens when a person whose immunity has lapsed is exposed to pertussis and how much that person contributes to transmission. [MORE

Miguel Gandert

Communication & Journalism Professor Miguel Gandert has received the Artist-in-Residence Award from the Center for Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Gandert will travel to Chicago over fall break to present a public lecture and teach a seminar. Gandert will present, “Dancing on Hard Ground: Reading History and Intercultural Relationships in the Rituals of New Mexico, Mexico and Bolivia.”

The rituals profiled in this talk, both religious and secular, are a confluence of Meso-American indigenous peoples and the Spanish Colonial era. The celebrations are a living symbol of the historically complex 400-year relationship between European Christianity and the pre-colonial indigenous populations of the Americas.

“By examining the symbols of community celebrations as layers of text, a different history can be read. The themes of racism, exploitation, civil rights, social revolution and the environment are among the major issues mediated during these celebrations,” he said.   [More]  

UNM’s CETI Program Awarded $10.7 Million Grant from National Institutes of Health

The Center for Evolutionary and Theoretical Immunology (CETI), housed in the University of New Mexico (UNM) Biology Department, was recently awarded a five-year, $10.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) Centers for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) program.

This is the second COBRE award received by CETI, the first $10.3 million was awarded in October 2003. It assures CETI’s ability to further strengthen, consolidate and position itself as one of the world’s preeminent centers in evolutionary and theoretical immunological research.

Under the direction of Principal Investigator Eric Loker and co-PI and infrastructure core director Rob Miller, CETI, which is the only COBRE funded program on UNM’s main campus, involves researchers from UNM’s Biology and Computer Science Departments, and theoretical biologists from Los Alamos National Lab (LANL).   [More]  

Tim Lowrey

UNM Regents’ Lecturer and Biology Professor Tim Lowrey was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the Flora North America Association. The Flora of North America Association is a bi-national collaboration of more than 30 U.S. and Canadian institutions and organizations.

The association involves a project, Flora of North America, that has grown out of a long history of interest in the flora area and has built on the experiences of previous efforts to produce a comprehensive flora.   [More]  

Tribute to Dr. Trish Henning for International Year of Astronomy event "She is an Astronomer"

On behalf of over 400 visitors to the International Year of Astronomy event "She is an Astronomer," we wish to express our great appreciation for the efforts of Dr. Trish Henning.  She was one of 10 female presenters at the event.  Her presence as a role model for the many young women in attendance will have a lasting impact on their perception of science and their desire to pursue a career as a  scientist.

Too often in today's society, young women lose their interest in science as a career at an early age.  It is well documented that when they encounter successful female scientists, their interests are rekindled and often pursued.  It was our pleasure to introduce several high school age students to Trish and provide them the opportunity to talk about a science career.  Trish is a true professional astronomer, always willing to share her latest research activities as well as her tremendous knowledge of the night sky with anyone interested in astronomy.  

Details of the "She is an Astronomer" event are HERE

The Albuquerque Astronomical Society is greatly appreciative of her support of all of our activities. We also wish to thank A&S for supporting her as she continues to provide  assistance to The Albuquerque Astronomical Society (TAAS).

Anthropology Professor Explores Lives of Neanderthals in Spain

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Lawrence Guy Straus spent part of his summer in Western Europe with Jean Auel, author of the Earth’s Children series of books about the interactions between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.

Her first book, ‘The Clan of the Cave Bear,” began a publishing phenomenon that has sold more than 34-million books.       [More]  

Biology Professor Honored with Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring

Biology Professor Mary Anne Nelson was named today by the White House and President Barack Obama as one of 22 individuals and organizations to receive the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). Colleagues, administrators, and students from their home institutions nominate candidates for the Presidential Mentoring Award.

This Presidential Award recognizes individuals and organizations that have demonstrated a commitment to mentoring students and increasing the participation of minorities, women and disabled students in science, mathematics and engineering. An additional 87 recipients received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.      [More]  

Scientists at UNM, USC and Utah State Study Colorado Magmatism and Uplift

Shallow-marine and coastal rocks of that are 65 million years old drape the Colorado Plateau (for example, the Mancos Shale in New Mexico) so we know that the region was near sea level at that time. Today, these same rocks are uplifted by an average of 2.2 km above sea level.

Researchers at the University of New Mexico, University of Southern California and Utah State University, feel they have deciphered the mystery. Their work appears in a paper titled, “Colorado Plateau magmatism and uplift by warming of heterogeneous lithosphere,” published in the June 18 2009 issue of Nature magazine.      [More]  

Professor Robert D Miller recently has been awarded a Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship for 2010 from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellows are international scholars that spend up to two months in residence at the University of Melbourne each year.

Miller was nominated for being an internationally well known expert in the immune systems of marsupials. His current research is focused on Marsupial Immunobiology, funded by the National Science Foundation.     [More]  

UNM to Start Construction of New Math and Science Learning Center

The University of New Mexico will host a groundbreaking ceremony for the new Science and Mathematics Learning Center on Friday, June 5 at 10:30 a.m. at the current “B” parking lot located west of Clark Hall and south of Bandelier Hall. A reception will be held after the event.         [More]  

Update to this Announcement, June 08, 2009 from President Schmidly's Weekly Address

Groundbreaking Ceremony June 5, 2009

On Friday, I joined members of the Board of Regents, Dean Brenda Claiborne of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Alejandro Aceves, the distinguished former chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and others in breaking ground for UNM's new Science and Mathematics Learning Center.

Once completed, this innovative new facility will provide interactive, state-of-the-art classroom facilities and teaching laboratories to engage future UNM freshmen in mathematics and science courses taught by faculty in the Departments of Biology, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Earth and Planetary Sciences and Mathematics and Statistics. These Arts and Sciences departments consistently comprise the highest enrollments for undergraduates within the University.

Many thanks for the generosity and forward thinking by taxpayers of the State of New Mexico, the Bank of America and all the donors who are making this project possible.

Arts & Sciences Interdepartmental Teaching Assistantships

The Arts & Sciences Interdepartmental Teaching Assistantship program is designed to help departments find qualified TAs to meet their instructional needs.

Each year certain departments in the College of Arts & Sciences face more of a demand for instruction than they can fill from their graduate student population.         [More]  

Margaret Werner-Washburne	Zachary Sharp	Linda Hall

Brenda J. Claiborne, dean, College of Arts & Sciences, announces the appointments of Professors Linda Hall, history; Zachary Sharp, Earth & Planetary Sciences; and Margaret Werner-Washburne, biology; as the college’s Regents Professors for 2009-2012.

Regents professor is a title bestowed on selected senior faculty members who, in the judgment of the dean on the advice of a faculty selection committee, merit recognition of their accomplishments as teachers, scholars and leaders in university affairs and in their national/international scholarly communities.

“Each Regents Professor named this term exemplifies the very best that our faculty members offer from the profession,” Claiborne said.The appointment comes with an annual stipend of $8,300 to be used either as a salary supplement or for research support, or both.“The college was very fortunate to receive an excellent group of nominees for the three Regents’ Professorships it sought to fill,” Claiborne said.