Nine UNM faculty promoted to rank of Distinguished Professor

The University of New Mexico announces the promotion and honor of nine faculty to the rank of Distinguished Professor. The rank of Distinguished Professor is awarded to faculty who have demonstrated outstanding achievements and are nationally and internationally renowned scholars. This is the highest title that UNM bestows upon faculty.

The selections cut across campus from the School of Medicine and College of Pharmacy to the Anderson School of Management, School of Engineering and College of Arts and Sciences on main campus. The research conducted over the decades by this group of faculty demonstrates the very high levels of research activity conducted by an R1 institution, a designation by the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education. UNM is the only university in New Mexico with this prestigious designation.

The faculty promoted to Distinguished Professors include Elaine Bearer, Matthew Campen, Cameron Crandall, Tobias Fischer, Mala Htun, Tiffany Lee, Gabriel Lopez, Xin (Robert) Luo and Robert Miller.

"I'm proud and frankly humbled to see the incredible work of this year's distinguished professors," said James Holloway, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at UNM. "From transforming patient care and understanding the complexity of the human body, to understanding the complexity of the Earth we stand on, to revitalizing the critical languages so critical to our shared humanity, and beyond, our distinguished professors are changing our understanding of ourselves, our society, and our world. New Mexico is blessed to have such amazing people at our flagship university."

See below for more on the achievements of this year's group of Distinguished Professors.

Elaine Bearer, Pathology, School of Medicine

Professor Dr. Elaine Bearer is a brain scientist and practicing physician whose work combines molecular pathology with novel imaging techniques to understand cognitive impairment, dementia, and emotional regulation. Her work is marked by its wide scope and range of methods, as well as its impact on fundamental techniques in pathology. Bearer's work has received continuous NIH R01 support for over 25 years, resulting in 83 peer-reviewed journal articles, two books, eight book chapters, 55 published abstracts and peer-reviewed short papers, and three patents.

Bearer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She served as vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pathology from 2009-2015. She has contributed to shared research resources including the establishment of the UNM Brain Bank and the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC).

Outside UNM, Bearer's extensive service commitments include serving as Editor in Chief for Natural Sciences, Charter member of the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution), co-founder of the San Lucas Health Project in San Lucas Tolimán, Sololá, Guatemala, which provides health care of over 40,000 persons in a remote area, and organizer for Art and Science Systems Biology in New Mexico, a public outreach art exhibition.

Matthew Campen, Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy

Professor Matthew Campen is an environmental toxicologist whose work has focused on the physical effects of inhaled pollutants on the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. His research is noted for having established the interactive effects of gaseous and particulate emissions on the body. These discoveries played key role in explaining observed elevated health risks experienced by individuals who live near pollution sources, such as highways.

Campen's recent work examines emerging contaminants including wildfire smoke, ozone, and microplastics. A key element of his work has been to track inflammatory signals in the blood following exposures. Portions of his work have involved extensive community engagement, including mobile lab work to gauge the impact of windblown dust from former uranium mining sites. Campen's research has been supported by some $26.9 million in NIH funding, plus $3.3 million from other funders. He is currently PI on 3 NIH R01 grants and directs two funded centers.

Campen has served in multiple service and leadership roles within UNM, including the co-director of the UNM Clinical and Translational Science Center and the director of the UNM Center for Metals in Biology and Medicine. His public service has included frequently providing media comments on wildfire events and public health and educational initiatives in high schools in Albuquerque and Santa Fe (on, among other things, the dangers of e-cigarettes) as well as his current research on microplastics that has garnered worldwide attention. Campen is active in the discipline including Society of Toxicology and the American Heart Association and has won multiple national awards for his scholarship.

Cameron Crandall, Emergency Medicine, School of Medicine

Professor Dr. Cameron Crandall is a scholar and practitioner of emergency medicine. His research program addresses a wide range of topics, including firearm trauma, injury prevention, device placement, resuscitation, and sedation. Crandall is particularly noted for his work on recognizing and treating intimate partner violence, responding to substance use disorders in emergency medicine settings, and caring for LGBTQ and gender-diverse patients. His work integrates social sciences with clinical science, and it has led to changes in clinical practices, legislation, and state policy.

Crandall is co-author of over 90 articles in general medicine journals as well as specialized outlets in emergency medicine. His scholarship on intimate partner violence is included in the leading textbook for emergency medicine. His research has been supported by over $3.5 million from multiple government agency sources.

Crandall has been an active and effective mentor and facilitator of others' research. He has mentored more than 85 residents and fellows, in addition to medical students and junior faculty. He led an expansion of the Emergency Medicine Department's research capacity and has served as vice-chair of research for the department. His community-engaged scholarship on the treatment of transgender, gender-diverse, and sexual minority patients has led to improved access to care. In 2021, he received the UNM School of Medicine's Stonewall Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of this work.

Crandall currently serves as associate vice president for LGBTQ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He has engaged in extensive statewide, national, and international service, including serving on and chairing the New Mexico Crime Victims Reparations Commission; serving on emergency preparedness groups for Olympics events hosted in Atlanta and Salt Lake City; and responding to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Tobias Fischer,Earth and Planetary Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences

Professor Tobias Fischer studies connections between volcanic gases and large-scale geological cycles, including subduction of the lithosphere, recycling of subducted volatiles through eruption of magmas, and the effects of volcanism and degassing on the chemistry of the atmosphere and the long-term carbon cycle. His work has shown how water and other volatiles are involved in magma generation, and how volcanic heat drives geothermal fluid circulation in the crust.

Fischer's findings include the discovery of linkages between variations in gas fluxes and explosive volcanic eruptions, the quantification of nitrogen recycling in subduction zones, and the discovery and quantification of the transfer of crust- and mantle-sourced carbon to the surface in continental rift zones. His work on carbon emissions in rift zones has crucial implications for climate research by providing more complete quantification of natural carbon emissions (which in turn allows better quantification of anthropogenic emissions) and understanding of mass and energy transport in both volcanic arc and intraplate/continental rift regions. He has promoted the use of continuous gas flux monitoring worldwide as a basis for predicting volcanic hazards.

Fischer received UNM's inaugural Globally Engaged Research award in recognition of his promotion of global research networks and efforts to build the capacity of volcanologists in the global South. Among several such roles, he chairs the Deep Carbon Degassing (DECADE) initiative that coordinates around 80 scientists from 12 countries to maintain continual monitoring efforts that facilitate eruption forecasting, quantify natural CO2 emissions, and provide quantitative assessment of the efficacy of engineered CO2 sequestration efforts.

Currently, Fischer directs a new center at UNM that monitors volcanic hazards globally. He has served on committees for the National Research Council, multiple NSF panels, multiple instrumentation facilities evaluation committees, and spent two years as a rotating program manager for NSF. His own program has been supported by over $4.7 million in research funding since coming to UNM of which $1.5 million is current funding.

Mala Htun,Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences

Professor Mala Htun is in the Political Science Department in the sub-field of comparative politics. She is a scholar of political rights and representation, with particular attention to the comparative determinants of policies about gender, sexuality, and family across countries and over time.

Htun's principal contributions have been 1.) to demonstrate that during transitions from dictatorships in Latin American the democratization processes counterintuitively enhanced the power of the opponents of liberalizing family and personal law; 2.) that mandatory quotas for female representation in some Latin American legislatures have not consistently led to substantive representation of women's interests because of subordination of representatives to party priorities; and 3.) that variations in policymaking on women's rights across countries and over time are affected by whether the policies in question are focused on women's status as a group, address state responsibilities for social well-being, or engage questions of religious doctrine.

In addition to Htun's work in comparative politics, her more recent team research has examined causes of gender and racial inequities in higher education and provided empirical evaluations of policies intended to produce more inclusive climates within universities, reduce unconscious bias, minimize harassment and incivility, and open up informal networks to women and members of underrepresented groups. These collaborative efforts have brought in over $5 million in funding from NSF and resulted in publications based on empirical examination of various policy interventions. She published proposals in Science to address the inequitable impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic careers.

Htun has been extensively involved in national academic leadership through positions in the American Political Science Association, including Vice-President and chair of the Presidential Task Force on Women's Advancement in Political Science. Her work has led to a number of national recognitions, including a summer fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and her induction as a Fellow in the American Association of Arts and Sciences, among others.

Tiffany Lee, Native American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences

Tiffany Lee is a professor and chair of Native American Studies. Her research has focused on Indigenous education and language revitalization, especially among the Diné, on how to integrate Indigenous language immersion into the curriculum, and on the role that language revitalization can perform in promoting strong Indigenous communities and advancing tribal self-determination. Lee's work is both theoretically framed and evidence based, and includes a strong community-based component. Her research draws strength from her own work as a teacher serving native communities at the beginning of her career.

Lee has a strong record of grant funding in a field that receives comparatively little support from funders, having been PI or co-PI on grants from the Mellon Foundation and the New Mexico Public Education Department totaling $1.5 million, as well as a team member on a two-year Kellogg Foundation grant for $640,000 to support formation of the Saad K'idilyé "language nest" immersion program.

Lee is currently president of the American Indian Studies Association. She was the founding chair of the Native American Studies department. Outside of UNM, she has served on numerous state and community councils and working groups related to American Indian education.

Gabriel Lopez, Chemical and Biological Engineering, School of Engineering

Professor Gabriel Lopez is a biomedical engineer whose work has focused on the creation of new biomaterials, the control of interfaces between materials and biological systems, and development of bioanalytical methodologies and systems. Among his diverse contributions has been to identify what chemical features of synthetic surfaces resist the attachment of proteins and cells (biofouling). This has important implications for preventing infection of implanted medical devices.

Lopez's work has been supported by approximately $50 million in funding from a range of agencies, including NSF, NIH, DOE, DTRA, DIA, the Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, SNL, and LANL, as well as from foundation and industry source. He holds 43 patents, and several of his inventions have been licensed by start-up companies. He was the creator of UNM's graduate program in Biomedical Engineering the founding director of UNM's Center for Biomedical Engineering.

Lopez is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and of the National Academy of Inventors, among numerous other honors. In 2020 he was appointed to NSF's Committee for Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering. Lopez has been active in community service, developing technologies for low-cost testing and treatment of water supplies, and low-cost point-of-care diagnostic services to address heath care service disparities in low-income and minority communities. He served at the UNM Vice President for Research from 2016-2020.

Xin (Robert) Luo, Marketing, Information, and Decision Science, Anderson School of Management

Professor Xin (Robert) Luo is a scholar of information security, privacy protection strategic management of information systems, and global IT management. He has published 132 peer-reviewed journal articles, 83 conference proceedings, and 11 book chapters. Twelve of his articles are published in the top business journals such as Information Systems, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and Journal of Management Information Systems.

At least 52 of Luo's other articles are placed in journals rated A* by the Australian Business Deans Council. He has been cited just under 10,000 times. Google Scholar ranks him as the 3rd most cited scholar in the area of behavioral information security. He has been named by Stanford University and Elsevier publications as one of the world's top 2% scientists.

Luo's research has been supported by $5 million in grant funding from NSF and the National Security Agency. In addition to his information security work, he has conducted public interest studies on teacher recruitment and retention, examining teachers' social support and coping strategies, with particular attention to the stresses on female teachers. In addition to his own scholarly work, Luo has contributed to journals in his field, as Co- Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Accounting and Information Management, and Associate Editor for the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.

Robert Miller, Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

Professor Robert Miller is a comparative immunologist, much of whose work has focused on marsupial and monotreme molecular immunology. His work demonstrates how marsupials and monotremes contribute key information about the evolution of the immune system in mammals. His research has expanded to cover whalers, reptiles, birds, and invertebrates.

Miller's laboratory discovered a third lineage of T-cell receptors in marsupials and his work has led to fundamental discoveries about how the immune system works, including immune suppression during pregnancy. He has also documented the capacity of neonatal marsupials to regenerate spinal cords that have been cut or crushed, a capacity that is later suppressed by immune functions as the animals mature. Understanding how immune mechanisms and tissue regeneration interact may have potential medical implications in the future.

Miller took three years away from UNM (2015-2018) to serve as acting director and then deputy director of the Division of Integrative Organizational Systems at the National Science Foundation. During this period, he wrote the NSF white paper outlining the problems of antibiotic resistance that informed then-President Barack Obama's 2016 White House Microbiology initiative. The Department of Homeland Security has twice selected Miller to represent NSF on the advisory committee on Foreign Animal Disease Threats.

In addition to his national visibility, Miller's work is recognized internationally, especially in Australia, where he frequently collaborates and has participated in research funded by the Australian Research Council, as well as in China and Mexico.

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