UNM sociology professor Lisa Broidy named as a regents’ professor

Dr. Lisa Broidy in July was named as one of three regents’ professors at UNM, an award for senior faculty members with outstanding accomplishments in teaching and scholarship.

Broidy, a sociology professor, said she was honored to learn of the appointment.

“I appreciate this recognition for the research I have been doing on female offending and victimization and its impacts on both women and their children. This award also recognizes the efforts I have put into building collaborative national and international research networks, which increases the scope and impact of my work and, frankly, makes it more fun,” she said.

Broidy received her PhD from Washington State University in 1997. Currently, she is the director of the Graduate program in the Department of Sociology and serves as on the Program Committee for the University’s Master of Public Policy Program. She is also an Affiliated Professor with the Griffith Criminology Institute in Brisbane, Australia. Her research focuses on the intersection of criminology and gender, with applications to theory and practice. Theoretically, her work explores the role of strain and emotions as both motivations and constraints to female offending. Her work also examines how women’s life course experiences shape their offending and victimization trajectories. As Director and Deputy Director of three research institutes during her career, she has also conducted policy focused evaluation research. Her work in this domain has, for instance, examined women’s interface with the criminal justice system and health systems and related policy implications. Specifically, she has examined the role of the police and the courts, as well as health care systems in response to intimate partner violence. She is also currently involved in two projects examining the impacts of mother’s criminal justice system contacts on their families and children.

According to the UNM Arts and Sciences Department website, regents’ professor is a “special title bestowed on selected senior faculty members who, in the judgment of the Dean and on the advice of a faculty selection committee, merit recognition of their accomplishments as teachers, scholars and leaders both in University affairs and in their national/international professional communities.”

UNM seismologist heads seafaring expedition off the coast of Alaska

UNM Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Dr. Lindsay Worthington was the co-chief scientist of a research expedition to gather seismic activity data off the coast of Alaska this summer.

For three weeks, Worthington and her team deployed 45 ocean-bottom seismometers that for the next 15 months or so will reside on the seafloor of the earthquake-abundant Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone recording earthquakes. The goal is to better understand earthquake and subduction zone hazards in Alaska.

Their project, called the the Alaska Amphibious Community Seismic Experiment, was funded by a $4 million-dollar NSF grant involving nine different institutions.

There is a lot of interest in this particular seismically-active area because the subduction zones including the one Worthington and her team are studying are known to produce the largest earthquakes and tsunamis on Earth. According to Worthington, the Alaska/Aleutian system alone has produced more magnitude-8 earthquakes than any other region in the last century.

“This project will produce a major, shore-crossing seismic dataset that will be completely open to the scientific community for analysis, driving innovation as many groups work on the data to understand what drives this system,” Worthington said.

UNM professor of community and regional planning receives 2018 Best Policy Paper Award

UNM Associate Professor of Community and Regional Planning Dr. Caroline Scruggs has been awarded the 2018 Best Policy Paper Award from the Environmental & Water Resources Institute (EWRI) for her and co-author Bruce Thomson’s paper entitled “Opportunities and Challenges for Direct Potable Water Reuse in Arid Inland Communities.”

Scruggs’s areas of research focus on water reuse and scarcity in the Southwest, chemical policies that support the health of humans and the environment, and public awareness and education in both of these areas.

Her paper is the first to identify and describe the differences, as well as constraints, that inland communities face when it comes to water reuse; in contrast to communities on the coast. These differences include: water rights, water resources and downstream considerations, regulatory uncertainty, technical challenges (especially for small communities), large costs, and public acceptance.

“The research suggests that a holistic assessment of these constraints must be conducted early in the planning stages when considering direct potable reuse (DPR) projects for inland communities,” Scruggs said.

Her research on water reuse that laid the foundations for the award-winning paper is funded by the National Science Foundation and the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute.

This paper is important for inland communities everywhere, especially for dry, desert climates such as New Mexico’s.

“Inland communities have been largely overlooked in the potable water reuse literature to date, and our NSF grant paid for open access to the article so that it can be freely available to inland water managers who may be interested in the feasibility of potable water reuse for their communities,” Scruggs said.

Beyond producing an award winning paper that is helping to bring the issue of inland community water reuse to light, Scruggs is conducting other water reuse research in collaboration with students and colleagues.

This includes understanding current public attitudes toward indirect and direct potable water reuse, finding the best approach to educate the public on programs that will help communities make informed decisions about potable water reuse, and how chemical policies and public awareness for management of hazardous chemicals could be improved due to the inevitability of potable water reuse across the Southwest.

“I was really excited about publishing this paper because it’s the first to identify and describe the unique challenges faced by arid inland communities in implementing potable water reuse. The award was quite an honor,” Scruggs said.

Anthropology professor receives Fulbright Award to continue research in Chile’s Atacama Desert

UNM Professor Dr. Frances Hayashida is a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award for the fall of 2018. This award will allow Hayashida to teach at the Universidad de Chile and continue her anthropology field work in the Atacama Desert.

Hayashida, along with her Chilean and Spanish colleagues, will continue to co-direct an archaeological research project on late pre-Hispanic water management and agriculture in the hyperarid, high-altitude Atacama Desert of northern Chile.

Along with the support of the Fulbright Scholar Award, Hayashida’s research has also been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (Chile), the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and UNM’s Latin American and Iberian Institute.

“The funding we have received to date is important to me because much of it has come from programs directed towards fostering international collaborations… We and our students have all benefited from working together and bridging our differences in background, training, and ideas,” Hayashida said in an email.

Hayashida and her team’s research at the Atacama Desert reveals how the late pre-Hispanic indigenous population have successfully managed scarce water to be able to farm and flourish within such a hyperarid environment for over centuries.

“This knowledge is of academic and general interest particularly as we face increasingly drier climates in many parts of the world,” she said.

Hayashida’s collaborative, interdisciplinary research includes: documenting, mapping, and dating canal and field systems and settlements; collecting information to reconstruct past environments; studying ancient soil management; as well as studying ritual features that help us understand the ethics of water and land use in the past.

“Our project is a true collaborative effort where the four co-directors jointly make all decisions, which is at times difficult but is also extremely productive and rewarding,” Hayashida said.

The Fulbright Scholar Award will take effect fall of 2018 and will allot four months of teaching and field work in the Atacama Desert for Hayashida.

New Astronomy and Physics professor will continue cosmic microwave background research at UNM

Dr. Darcy Barron will be joining UNM’s Physics and Astronomy Department as a new assistant professor starting in the fall of 2018.

Barron hails from UC Berkeley, where she has been an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow since 2015.

The fellowship, “supported me to continue my research as well as expand my involvement in education and outreach,” Barron said.

Originally from Illinois, she attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she majored in engineering physics and in 2015,  finished her master’s and Ph.D. at UC San Diego.

Barron’s area of interest within cosmology includes the measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

“Surveys of the faint CMB polarization signal will provide detailed maps of the distribution of matter in the Universe, and could give new insight into the earliest inflationary period immediately after the Big Bang,” Barron said.

To further her research, Barron primarily works with the POLARBEAR Array located in the Atacama Desert of Chile to survey the CMB. As well as helping to identify neutrino masses and map out the structure of the universe, Barron is also involved in the Simons Observatory project, which is dedicated to expanding the site in Chile with larger and more advanced telescopes.

One thing Barron is looking forward at UNM is the new interdisciplinary physics and astronomy building, which is under construction.

“I’m really excited about the new building (PAÍS) where my lab will be located once construction is completed. It’s a really great opportunity to have so much input on my new lab space…It will be fun to watch the construction progress over the next year.”

For more information on Barron’s research and publications, visit her website.