UNM professor receives funding for work that could help fight cancer

Lina Cui, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has received a $543,335 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop a positron emission tomography or PET imaging probe for heparanase that could help detect aggressive cancer lesions. Heparanase is an enzyme that regulates many cellular processes, and is a major point of study for cancer treatments.

The probe could help with melanoma in particular.

According to the grant abstract, “early melanoma can be overlooked, because harmless moles and early melanoma tumors can look similar under the microscope, which is commonly used by pathologists for melanoma diagnosis. Therefore new diagnostic techniques are highly demanded in the diagnosis of melanoma. Better and earlier diagnosis is particularly needed for individuals who have excessive exposure to the ultraviolet radiation from the sun.”

The research is funded through August of 2020.

Polisci prof will delve into emotional side of politics

UNM political science professor Dr. Lonna Atkeson has won a $30,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study people’s emotions in the current political environment.

The project, called “Emotion Regulation, Attitudes, and Activism in Extraordinary Times,” is part of a one-year grant from the NSF. It will include a survey that looks at emotion regulation habits across society and looks at “whether, over time, these habits foster agreement or polarization,” according to UNM News.

“Rarely do higher education faculty get awarded a timely grant,” Atkeson said. “But this funding comes at a time when it is particularly interesting to see how emotions are contributing to the political conversation,” Atkeson told UNM News.

Atkeson is the director of the Center for the Study of Voting, Elections, and Democracy and has taught at UNM since 1995.

Political science professor mentors people and sends students to Germany

Dr. Kathy Powers received an NSF grant in 2015 with Dr. Christian Davenport from the University of Michigan to support African-American students and faculty on the path to Ph.Ds and tenure positions in political science. Powers is the first tenured African-American woman in the United States in quantitative international relations.

In addition, Powers worked with Dr. Kristina Yu, also from UNM, to establish a college course “focused on how architecture and planning can be instruments of state repression as well as important tools for post conflict reconstruction in the aftermath of war and human rights violations,” Powers said.

The pair received backing to bring UNM students to Berlin, Germany to study “The Architecture of Justice,” as the course name says.

Powers is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, along with appointments in the Program of Africana Studies and the UnM School of Law. She is currently writing a book called “Making Amends: The New Politics of Global Reparations,” which she is working on under a research fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars.

Dr. Lindsay Lowe Worthington recently received a $154,689 grant from the National Science Foundation to study the Earth’s structure. Her work aims to understand deformation of the Earth’s crust, glacial history of high latitude continental margins, and faulting and seismic hazards.

Worthington, of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, works to understand the interplay of tectonics and magmatism during continental breakup.  

“The history of the supercontinent Pangea tells us that continents break apart to form new ocean basins, but we don’t know how or why. Tectonic plates are too strong to break apart just by stretching them, so we know that magmatism must play a role in weakening the Earth’s crust and upper mantle and facilitating continental breakup, “ she said.

With collaborators at Southern Methodist University and graduate students at UNM, Worthington  is  analyzing the crust and upper mantle structure of the east coast of the United States using both onshore and offshore seismological data across the coastal plains and continental shelf and slope of North Carolina. She hopes to quantify crustal extension and map potential magmatic emplacement across the margin to understand the interplay of tectonics and magmatism during continental breakup.

Professors help underrepresented students prepare for graduate school

Two UNM professors, Dr. Cristina Takacs-Vesbach and Dr. Heather Canavan, are spearheading UNM’s Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC), a program designed to help underrepresented groups pursue biomedical research opportunities and higher education through training and support. Takacs-Vesbach is from the Biology department, while Canavan is from the Chemical and Biological Engineering department.

The program includes traveling to present research, conducting research at other universities and graduate school advice. Participants can come from a wide array of fields, from biology to computer science.

MARC is funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

UNM EPS prof studies Tibetan geothermal springs

Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Laura Crossey is working with three collaborators to understand the deep structure of the world’s most dramatic tectonic collision. Now beginning its second year, her research is funded through 2019 by the Structure and Tectonics Program of National Science Foundation.

The collaborators are professors Karl Karlstrom (also at UNM,) Simon Klemperer of Stanford University and Zhao Ping of the Chinese Academy of Sciences)

“We are using geochemical tracers to better constrain the suturing process at this important tectonic boundary,” Dr. Crossey said.

Physics professor helps organize national conference

Dr. Sally Seidel is organizing a national conference called “New Technologies for Discovery: the Third Workshop of the Coordinating Panel for Advanced Detectors” to be held at UNM from October 12-14.

The conference will focus on instrumentation used in particle physics experiments.

Seidel received a $5,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in June to help cover some of the costs.

“This particular grant will provide stipends for junior scientists (graduate students and postdocs) to attend the conference and present their research,” Seidel said.

UNM promotes professor who studies crime and gender

Dr. Lisa Broidy was recently promoted to professor in the Department of Sociology.

Her research investigates the connection between crime and gender. Her work centers on how social and structural customs constrain women’s opportunities and incentives for committing serious crimes. She looks at gendered procedures for criminal justice policy and practice, especially those surrounding female incarceration and domestic violence.

“I am currently working on a grant-funded project in Australia that examines the impacts of maternal incarceration on children,” Broidy said. “Using a developmental framework, the project aims to detail how maternal incarceration affects children’s socio-emotional development and related behavioral outcomes, how this varies by the age of the child, and what contexts and experiences protect children with incarcerated mothers from deleterious outcomes.”

Healthy bat populations are being studied to prevent deadly disease

Biology research scientist Jennifer Jane Marshall Hathaway is studying the microbiome in bats in New Mexico to help understand healthy bat populations.

Funded by the New Mexico Fish and Game department, the project could potentially assist in the prevention of the spread of white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that can kill about 99% of infected bats in certain species.

“We are investigating both the bacterial and fungal overlap between bats from El Malpais National Monument and the caves in which they roost to determine what potentially beneficial bacteria and fungi bats are acquiring from their roosting environment,” Hathaway said. “This information will help determine the effects of any potential cave-wide treatments for White-nose syndrome, as well as better understand the microbiota of bats and their relationship to their environment.”