New Faculty 2020

Name: Dr. Michael Deyhle   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Health, Exercise & Sport Sciences   Describe your research in about 200 words. My Research is focused on understanding the mechanisms of skeletal muscle plasticity; the ability to change and adapt (or maladapt) to different stimuli or conditions. My Ph.D. studies focused on the role […] Read More

Name: Dr. Pankaj Kumar   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Mechanical Engineering   Describe your research in about 200 words. My research goals are to (a) develop materials utilizing the advanced manufacturing methodologies, (b) study physical, chemical, mechanical, and electrochemical phenomena at the mesoscale, and (c) use the engineered microstructure for novel aerospace, automobile, jet engines, […] Read More

Name: Dr. Holly Guise   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: History   Describe your research in about 200 words. My research focuses on World War II Indigenous history, Alaska Native history, gendered segregation, and Unangan (Aleut) evacuation and internment. I bridge together archival research from federal, university, and tribal archives with elder oral histories related to […] Read More

Name: Dr. Tonmoy Chakraborty   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Physics and Astronomy   Describe your research in about 200 words. Tissues are composed of multiple cell types organized in a complex three-dimensional architecture. However, because of the limited penetration depth of visible photons, observing the molecular and structural composition of intact tissues remains challenging. This […] Read More

Name: Dr. Aijuan Cun   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies   Describe your research in about 200 words. I received my Ph.D. degree in Curriculum, Instruction, and the Science of Learning with a concentration in Literacy Education from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. My research […] Read More

Name: Dr. Matias Sokolowski   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Accounting   Describe your research in about 200 words. My broad area of research is financial accounting using mostly archival research methods. My research focuses on disclosures and regulations, primarily in the context of debt markets. The purpose of my research is to explain how disclosures […] Read More

Name: Dr. William T. Holmes   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: TEELP   Describe your research in about 200 words. Leadership Communications, Motivating Language Theory, Culturally Sustaining Instructional Leadership, Instructional Leadership, and Improving New Mexico Public Education   What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student? Educators do many of the same things […] Read More

Name: Dr. Kari Schleher   Title: Curator of Archaeology and Assistant Professor   Department: Maxwell Museum of Anthropology and the Department of Anthropology   Describe your research in about 200 words. My research interests include the archaeology of the southwest United States and especially the history of Ancestral Pueblo communities in New Mexico and Colorado. My […] Read More

Name: Dr. Carmen Samora   Title: Lecturer III   Department: Chicana Chicano Studies   Describe your research in about 200 words. Mid-20th century Latino scholar activists – bringing their lives and research to current students so they know we all stand on the shoulders of giants.   What’s the most interesting thing you have learned […] Read More

Name: Dr. Haobing Liu   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering   Describe your research in about 200 words. Haobing’s research interests center on energy, emissions, and air quality modeling of transportation sectors, with special interests in exploring innovative technologies and policies that shape sustainable transportation systems.   What’s […] Read More

Name: Dr. Lei Yang   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering   Describe your research in about 200 words. My research interests are in Automated Machine Learning, Embedded Systems and High-Performance Computing Architectures.   What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student? Learn how to learn from the scratch.

Name: Dr. Susan R. Atlas   Title: Associate Professor   Department: Chemistry & Chemical Biology   Describe your research in about 200 words. As a theoretical and computational chemical physicist, the problems I work on live at the interface between multiple fields: electronic structure theory and molecular dynamics; quantum computing and quantum chemistry; molecular biophysics and […] Read More

Name: Dr. Olivia Tucker   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Music Education   Describe your research in about 200 words. I am fascinated by how music education freshmen enter college as students and immediately begin developing teacher identities. I study how teacher identity is shaped by personal experiences both in and out of the classroom. In […] Read More

Name: Dr. Ashley Phelps   Title: Visiting Assistant Professor   Department: Health, Exercise and Sports Sciences: Physical Education Teacher Education   Describe your research in about 200 words. I study attitudes towards technology use in physical education from a preservice physical education teacher perspective. Additionally, I am interested in technological pedagogical content knowledge and how […] Read More

Name: Dr. Dave Keating   Title: Assistant Professor   Department: Communication & Journalism   Describe your research in about 200 words. My primary research examines social influence processes and health communication topics. Much of my current work investigates how people process persuasive messaging and how they are affected by the messages they receive. This work often […] Read More

Name: Dr. Miriam Gay-Antaki Title: Assistant Professor Department: Department of Geography and Environmental Studies   Describe your research in about 200 words. My work focuses on human-environment relations in the era of anthropogenic global climate change. I draw from the frameworks of political ecology and feminist geography to trace climate change policy development as a series […] Read More

Name: Dr. Claus Danielson Title: Assistant Professor Department: Mechanical Engineering Describe your research in about 200 words. My research interests are in optimization, planning, and control. My specialty is developing methods for exploiting structure in large-scale or complex control and optimization problems. I have applied my research to a variety of fields including robotics, autonomous driving, […] Read More