Event Recaps

Faculty members learned about how best to work with their program officers on Oct. 19th at Advance’s workshop entitled “Your Program Officer as a Guide.”

Professors from across the university served as panelists, including Jane Lehr of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Lehr was previously employed at Sandia National Laboratories and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Other panelists included:

— Interim Director of CASAA Scott Tonnigan, who has had 30 years of continuous NIH funding for his research.

— Tom Turner of the Biology Department, who is an associate dean of research in the School of Arts and Science who recently finished an appointment as a program officer at the NSF.

—  Daniel Feezell, who is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Feezell is involved with the Center for High Technology Materials (CHTM), and is funded by NSF, DOE, DOD, DARPA, DITRA National Labs and other private industries.

Project officers have three main functions that are important for potential applicants to keep in mind when attempting to foster a relationship with their program officer, specifically in the realm of the NIH, according to Tonnigan.

“One [of these roles] is to bounce of initial ideas to see if a particular institute … is interested in that idea … and one of the biggest challenges as an applicant will be to identify the appropriate institute for your idea,” he said.

To find the appropriate place for your submission, get in touch with a program officer, Tonnigan said.

“Another role is in the review process … they can give you feedback once you have received your summary statements …The third is monitoring the progress of your award on a yearly basis,” he said.

Tonnigan also pointed out that having a good relationship with your program officer is beneficial because they can search for other opportunities for you outside of your award given to you by the institution.

Panelists also discussed the importance of white papers.

“I always recommend starting with a white paper, and in fact, I spend more time on a white paper than I do on the proposal … because that’s what gets their attention, that is what generates excitement,” Lehr said.  

Additionally, the relevance of white papers across different institutions was discussed. Tonnigan stressed that audience members should “formalize your ideas in advance,” because not all officers are the same.

Feezell also suggested avoiding unsolicited responses to feedback to your submitted proposal, as rebuttals will not help your relationship with a program officer.

Another method of making initial contact with your program manager, aside from the white paper, according to Feezell, would be to, “try to volunteer as a reviewer … be a reviewer, go sit on a panel, and you will meet the program officer. Review for the program you want to submit to.”

Questions posed by the audience included asking the panelists if program officers take offense when someone turns down an invitation to be on a panel because of scheduling conflicts. In response to this, Lehr said to tell them about the conflict, but then say, “If there is anything I can do remotely, please ask me first.” She said telling the program officer this sends the message of still being interested.

Another question from the audience was how to appear more interested in the programs for different agencies.

“You can directly contact a program officer for the program that you are interested in and say that you would love to do some reviewing,” Turner said.

Feezell also agreed with Turner’s point, but added that attending a workshop put on by the program officer allows you to interact with the program officer of someone’s desired program.

UNM faculty received mindfulness meditation tips from Vanessa Haye on Oct. 5th at a workshop hosted by Advance at UNM.

Vanessa Haye, LPCC, a senior counselor and social worker at the UNM Counseling, Assistance and Referral Services (CARS), presented the benefits and tips of basic mindfulness meditation.

Haye began with a definition of mindfulness.

“Mindfulness is not about being totally zenned out, it’s about being with whatever you are experiencing,” she said.

Haye said being mindful relies on deep breathing. Focusing on breathing allows you to be present in the moment because you are focusing on your body, and your body always resides in the present.

Audience members participated in three different exercises: meditative breathing, mindful eating, and body relaxation. In the first exercise, Haye asked the participants to breathe deeply and try to be present in the moment. In the second exercise, Haye gave participants a grape and a piece of candy and told them to eat slowly to promote a unique eating experience. In the third exercise, Haye asked participants to send their breath to certain parts of their bodies for appreciation and relaxation.

To conclude the workshop, Haye explained the physical benefits of mindfulness meditation. Not only does it reduce stress, but breathing deeply creates “the relaxation response” which is the opposite of the fight, flight, or freeze response. This allows the body to relax and focus clearly on the present.

“[Meditation] is not something that you can fail at doing or succeed at doing. There’s no master of meditation because it is just simply the act of doing it,” Haye said.

One of the videos Haye showed to participants in the workshop.

Recently promoted associate professors learned more about their new role and responsibilities Sep.14 at an orientation for associate professors hosted by Advance at UNM.

At the event, associate professors were made aware of the resources available to them and were advised on how to transition to full professorship. Speakers included Julia Fulghum, director of Advance at UNM, Phil Ganderton, the senior associate dean and associate dean of faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences, Tina Takacs-Vesbach, a professor of biology, Rich Wood, interim provost and Mary Jo Daniel, director of UNM’s Faculty Research Development Office.

The orientation began with a presentation led by Fulghum, who gave an overview of what professors can expect in their new positions. She highlighted new opportunities for associate professors, including the chance to regain parts of life that they recently had sacrificed, the opportunity to do more community engaged research and outreach, and the ability to try out riskier research ideas including exploring new research directions and trying out more long-term ideas.

During her presentation, Takacs-Vesbach said there are challenges related to being an associate professor, but one can avoid becoming stuck in a rut through recovering, resetting, and thinking ahead.

“Once you’ve taken the steps to take care of yourself and make sure you are good in your body, your mind, and your family, it’s time to plan ahead. So you need to start thinking about where you want to be in 5, 10, 15 years, ” she said.

Daniel spoke about resources for research and scholarship UNM FRDO can provide to associate professors and how associate professors have more time to pursue research interests.

“I encourage you to reach out, if you want to get some feedback on what you’re thinking and what are the resources; we can help you find funding mechanisms,” she said.

To conclude the orientation, Wood hosted a Q&A session and talked about the vision for the future of UNM. Some of the questions asked included how minorities can be better represented at UNM and what the future of higher education is.

To hear more from the event, watch the videos below.

Cecilia Brooke Cholka, the Human Protection Specialist with the Office of the Institutional Review Board, explained current IRB processes and discussed changes to federal regulations on April 20 in the Advance at UNM space. She also discussed where the UNM IRB office is now after recent innovations. See our video below to learn more.

View Cholka’s slides here.

Faculty who experience inappropriate, biased or harassing comments from co-workers have five strategies for responding, according to Stephanie Goodwin, the director of faculty leadership and development at Wright State University.

Goodwin taught the strategies, which can include disagreeing and questioning, at three workshops hosted by Advance UNM in April, including about 75 faculty and administration leaders including department chairs.

Her presentation, called “Speaking Up To Bias: What’s a Bystander to Do?” gave attendees the tools to properly respond to incidents of bias.

The first way to respond to bias is with a question or interruption, Goodwin said.

An example would be to ask “what did you mean by…?” Additionally, one can remind people of their better selves by arousing dissonance and saying something like ”I’m surprised to hear you say that. You’ve always supported equity and this doesn’t sound like you at all to me.”

A bystander can disagree and “leave space for grace,” Goodwin said. An example of disagreement would be “Do you mean just her, or all women?” Someone can pivot away from the biased statement by saying “have you met…” Finally, someone can express their emotions and say “I’m really uncomfortable/disappointed/surprised by this comment. ”A bystander can also use nonverbal cues like facial expressions to express their feelings.

Goodwin first emphasized that she cannot tell people when to interfere or how to interfere during a specific situation. Deciding when to speak up is a personal choice based on a moral compass.

“I’m not going to say every time you see something, speak up,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin defines biases as thoughts, feelings and actions based on perceived group identities, including gender, race, sex, ethnicity, age and sexuality. In many instances, people encounter implicit — or as Goodwin prefers to call them, unintended biases — in everyday life. Such biases can have a huge effect on a person’s life.

“Subtle biases deplete the satisfaction we experience,” Goodwin said.

Biases tend to come out in social cues like smiling and eye contact. They often happen to “leak out,” Goodwin said.

Bystanders often have have three main motivations to interfere: stop the harm, change others, and express values. When a person does speak up and interfere, Goodwin said that it can lead to increased self esteem, decreased rumination about the incident, and a number of other things.

Sometimes a person wants to say something, but does not. This can be explained by Goodwin’s CPR Model. The bystander assesses if the incident is urgent, if they are responsible, what they can do, and what the cost of intervening would be. If the bystander deems the incident to be not urgent, for example, the bystander might not intervene. However, it is often the cost that is the biggest factor.

“What looms large is potential cost,” Goodwin said.

Sometimes it can be best to respond to a situation at a later time. Additionally, higher-ranking people should set the standards for how people respond.

“Norms follow power,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin also recommended “confronting thyself” and practicing self-confrontation to create a role model for others to look to.

“When we model for other people…we create the space to get this work done.”

The UNM community honored psychology professor and director of Center on Alcoholism, Substance Abuse and Addictions Dr. Barbara McCrady’s work on April 4 at the 63rd Annual Research Lecture.

Her lecture “‘Til Death Do Us Part: A Lifetime of Research to Better Understand and Treat Alcohol Use Disorders in the Family”  focused on her career in psychology, particularly the effectiveness of conjoint therapy and alcoholism in women.

Most of McCrady’s research focuses on alcohol behavioral couple therapy (ABCT) when treating alcohol disorders. ABCT involves the person with the alcohol problem coming in to treatment along with their significant other. McCrady said the three goals ABCT hopes to accomplish is to get the patient to stop drinking and maintain abstinence, help the partner learn behaviors to cope with drinking and support change, and improve the intimate relationship between the patient and the partner.

Later in her career, McCrady decided to conduct another study focusing on women.

“We were really struck by how often the women who called did not want couples therapy,” McCrady said.

The study was designed to allow women to choose whether they wanted to attend individual therapy or couple therapy.

“Overwhelmingly, they chose individual therapy,” McCrady said.

There were three main reasons why women chose individual over couple therapy, according to McCrady. One was the desire to change on her own. The woman felt that it was her problem, so she should be the one to fix it. There were also logistical barriers to the partner attending, especially if the couple had children and needed childcare. Lastly, there were concerns about the relationship, feeling that it was a little rough and wanted to work out their own problems by themself.

For the women who chose couple therapy, the two reasons for that decision were a desire to have a partner understand her needs and concerns about the relationship and wanting to make it better, McCrady said.

At the end of the study, McCrady learned that couple therapy could be used with individual therapy, as well as that women did not prefer couple therapy over individual therapy.

McCrady came to the University of New Mexico in 2007. She said she’s grateful to all of the colleagues she has gotten to work with.

“We’ve just had wonderful experiences,” McCrady said.

Around 2007, McCrady wanted to shift. She felt that she had developed a solid model for couple therapy, and now wanted to look at mechanism of change research. McCrady compared clinical trials to horse races, where a researcher wants to see which horse (treatment) wins. However, mechanism of change research is different.

“Mechanism of change research is going to get us away from horse race to how the best horses succeed,” McCrady said.

Mechanism of alcohol treatment engaging spouses (MATES) what actually happens in couples therapy does the therapist impact the behavior of the couple see how does the couple behavior relate to drinking outcomes

“It was the first look inside the therapy session,” McCrady said.

The study involved coding behavior from the patient, the partner and the therapist at the beginning session and the midway session. Researchers coded support, collaboration, etc. as positive behavior, contempt, confrontational language, etc. as negative in addition to neutral statements. McCrady found that almost 35 percent of the conversation was someone talking about themselves.

“We learned that people really like to talk about themselves,” she said.

General support and collaboration were high, as was alcohol-specific support from partners. However, none of those options indicated the outcome, whether positive or negative, of the alcohol treatment. But, contempt did.

“Contempt is the single strongest predictor of poor drinking outcomes,” McCrady said.

McCrady is currently in the middle of the Brief Family Involved Treatment (B-FIT), which tries to make couple therapy more feasible for insertion into other treatments options.

“B-FIT is our latest attempt at dissemination and how to make this work relevant to the real world,” McCrady said.

Although sexual coercion is the most talked-about form of sexual harassment, it’s not the most common form, Dr. Lilia Cortina told about 100 people at a presentation sponsored by Advance at UNM and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in March.

“The most prototypical kind of sexual harassment that people immediately think of…is the rarest form of sexual harassment,” Cortina said. “It’s the most stereotypical but it’s the most rare,” said Cortina, a professor of psychology and women’s studies and management at the University of Michigan, who defined sexual harassment as “behavior that derogates, demeans or humiliates and individual based on that individual’s sex.”

Cortina, who also is the associate director of the Advance program at Michigan, broke down the bigger issue of sexual harassment into three categories – sexual coercion, unwanted sexual attention, and gender harassment. Sexual coercion is when there is an implied better treatment, raise, etc. when an employee is sexually cooperative. Unwanted sexual attention occurs when someone continues to pursue an individual romantically despite repeated attempts to discourage such advances.

Gender harassment includes sexist or crude remarks made to disparage someone based on their gender. She gave a few examples of such remarks.

“Women don’t belong in science, men don’t belong in nursing,” Cortina said.

Cortina emphasized that men can be sexually harassed as well, and that the perpetrators are often other men. Many of the forms of harassment that men face liken them to women and criticize them for being too “feminine.”

“Men face forms of gender harassment…which amount to insults to their masculinity or insults for failing to living up to traditional heterosexual masculine ideas,” she said.

Gender harassment is the most common form of sexual harassment. In one survey, 34.3 percent of women employees had experienced gender harassment by their coworkers or supervisors at a large public university. 37.4 percent had not been harassed, and 4 percent of had experienced all three forms of sexual harassment, including sexual coercion.

One study found that gender harassment has at least as great, if not greater, impact on a person’s professional, physical and mental wellbeing as unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion, Cortina said. Gender harassment should not be seen as a lesser form of sexual harassment, but instead one that is very dangerous to employee wellbeing.

According to Cortina, one major risk factor for facing sexual harassment is being female or feminine. Additionally, being a sexual minority also increases the risk factor.

“Whenever we are able to ask sexual orientation, we always find a whopping disparity in what straight employees get targeted with versus gay, lesbian and bisexual identified employees,” Cortina said.

Workplaces that have sexual harassment problems often have other harassment problems as well, Cortina said. There is a strong correlation between sexual harassment and incivility, racial and ethnic harassment, and heterosexist harassment.

“They all kind of go together,” Cortina said. “When there is one form of abuse, you will often find the others.”

Experiencing sexual harassment can lead to a slew of negative consequences for the employee, ranging from job dissatisfaction and team conflict to anxiety, depression and sleep problems. These consequences do no arise from other stressors, other parts of the employee’s job, the employee’s personality, and other demographics, Cortina said.

“All the studies are converging on the same conclusion that these kind of outcomes aren’t explained by a variety of controls across a variety of studies,” she said.

As for solutions, Cortina stressed that workplaces should emphasize reporting less. While it is an important mechanism, no real change can be brought through such a system. There needs to be movement away from policies and procedures, as well as penalties for the most sexualized, coercive, and rare forms of sexual harassment.

“A lot of the focus on a lot of policies is unwanted sexual pursuit,” Cortina said. “We need to move away from the overemphasis of sexual pursuit as the quintessential sexual harassment.”

Cortina suggested a culture of respect to best counter harassment. She proposed implementing anti-harassment ideas while promoting respect and civility at the same time.

“Emphasize that discrimination is not just about using nasty name calling and racial epithets,” Cortina said. “It’s also very subtle behaviors.”

Cortina believes that sexual harassment can be stopped by not dismissing little actions.

“Taking the small things more seriously is an idea that I’ve been promoting to try to undermine that foundation…that’s propping up sexual harassment.”