Research and Creative Works Leadership Awards

The Research and Creative Works Leadership Awards were established in 2020 to honor recently promoted faculty who have accomplished outstanding research or creative works in their respective career stage. The award was created in response to a recommendation of the Faculty Senate Research Policy Committee that acknowledges faculty, who at the time of promotion to associate or full professor, have achieved especially significant impacts in their field.

As part of the review process, candidates are nominated by the Provost’s Advisory Review Committee and are selected by the provost following a rigorous external review that looks at the quality and impact of candidates’ scholarly and creative achievements.

2024

Jeremy Hogeveen, associate professor, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences
Hogeveen’s work combines cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology. Using a wide range of methods, he studies how the brain creates emotions and makes decisions. His work uses self-report questionnaires, brain imaging, performance-based behavioral tests, non-invasive brain stimulation, and computational modeling to explore how neurodevelopment, brain injury, or psychiatric disorders affect motivation, emotions, and decision making. His research findings include the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage on the motivation centers of the brain.

Yu Yu Hsiao, associate professor, Department of Individual, Family and Community Education in the College of Education and Human Sciences  
Hsiao is an educational psychologist who specializes in the refinement and application of quantitative methodologies. His research evaluates the properties of psychological and educational instruments, producing innovations in hierarchical linear modeling and structural equation modeling. He is noted for several methodological advances, as well as his commitment to collaborative research in a wide range of areas that include education, exercise science, treatment of substance-use disorders, and resilience and brain injuries. 

Cármelo de los Santos, professor, Department of Music, College of Fine Arts
De los Santos is an internationally recognized violinist who has given more than 100 solo performances in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. He is known for consistently achieving the highest levels of artistry, as well as performing and recording some of the most technically demanding pieces in classical music. He performs an extraordinarily wide repertoire and has premiered new music by living composers. In addition to his solo and chamber music achievements, he serves as concertmaster for the New Mexico Philharmonic.

Abdullah Mueen, professor, Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering
Mueen is a data scientist whose work focuses on creating efficient algorithms for data mining and machine learning. Applications of his work include renewable power systems, identifying opinion manipulation and misinformation bots on social media, detecting small seismic events, sequencing rare immune cells, and monitoring high-performance computing operations. He is the recipient of multiple awards for the novelty of his work, and he is widely respected for his commitment to open science principles and ethical applications of computer science.

Vanessa Svihla, professor, Department of Organization, Information and Learning Sciences in the College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences
Svihla is a learning scientist whose work focuses on how people learn as they frame design problems. She measures how students are affected by the opportunity to make consequential choices about how to frame problems, rather than solving pre-defined problems. Her work is highly collaborative, involving curricular experiments and measurements of student learning and agency. Her work has contributed to innovations in instructional design, engineering education, health education and organizational learning. She is noted for the practical applicability of many of her findings, as well as for sharing her coding tools and protocols. 

Julie In, associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, UNM School of Medicine
Her scholarship, which focuses on intestinal host-environmental toxicant interactions and ion transport and host-pathogen interactions, is being advanced through multiple National Institutes of Health grant awards. She is a leader in education through her course redesign and role as the lead instructor for the Organoids in Research block in BIOM 522: Methods in Molecular and Cellular Biology. She also is an American Gastroenterological Association congressional advocate for New Mexico.

Alicia Bolt, associate professor in the College of Pharmacy
Her research focus is on the toxicity of tungsten to help many in enhancing the diagnosis, understanding and management of tungsten-related cancer. Her lab's work on this relatively rare toxicant has the potential to further knowledge of cancer biology research. Her leadership in this area, including many publications and other dissemination products and activities, is helping improve education and service to health outcomes both locally and nationally. In 2020, she was selected as a UNM Regents Lecturer.

Andrew L. Sussman, professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, UNM School of Medicine
His research, which focuses on the cancer control continuum, will continue to help enhance the management of cancer survivors, particularly in rural areas of New Mexico. He is recognized as an institutional leader in qualitative and mixed methods research, and numerous residents, fellows, and faculty in clinical departments across HSC have benefited from his consultation and expertise in their research studies. His leadership role in RIOS Net, HSC’s practice-based research network, has served HSC, as well as hundreds of primary care clinicians statewide across diverse community and institutional settings.

2023

Clarence Cruz, associate professor, Department of Art, College of Fine Arts
Cruz is a renowned Pueblo potter who has revived six styles of pottery associated with Ohkay Owingeh, in collaboration with community partners and drawing on archaeological sources. He harvests clay and pigments from the earth in northern New Mexico and creates and fires finished work, using a variety of firing methods. He engages his students in this work at every stage. His pottery has been exhibited regionally and nationally to great acclaim and has been described as “technically flawless.”

Wendy Greyeyes, associate professor, Department of Native American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
Greyeye's research examines tribal sovereignty and community building, addressing the complex interplay of competing agendas, jurisdictions, and institutions that affect education policy, landholding, and social policy. Her work has advanced Native American Studies as a field based on thoughtful dialogue between academics and communities.

Eirini Tsiropoulou, associate professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering 
Tsiropoulou studies the interactions between human users and wireless networks, integrating theories and methods from engineering as well as the social sciences to understand how to optimally allocate scarce computing and network resources under various conditions. Her work has had significant theoretical and practical impact.

José M. Cerrato, professor, Gerald May Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering 
Cerrato studies water contamination associated with uranium mining, primarily in New Mexico. He is a leading expert in the biogeochemistry of metal contaminants and their interactions with soils, fungi, and plants, with important implications for human exposure and remediation. His research operates at microscopic and molecular levels to generate fundamental knowledge and then applies that knowledge to applications at contaminated sites that impact communities.

José-Luis Hurtado Ruelas, professor, Department of Music, College of Fine Arts 
Hurtado Ruelas is a composer and pianist whose compositions are performed by prominent soloists and ensembles world-wide. For example, during 2022, 2023, and 2024 performances and premiers of his work are taking place in Lithuania, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, Mexico, Argentina, and the US.  He is considered one of the most gifted composers of his generation, and his work is described as highly original, compelling, and daring, incorporating new styles of notation, and requiring exceptional virtuosity from performers. 

Emily Lena Jones, professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences
Jones is an environmental anthropologist who studies the connections between humans and animals in the context of environmental change. Her work spans three continents and tens of thousands of years, using tools of zooarchaeology, stable isotope geochemistry, ancient DNA, and statistical analysis. Her work has, among many things, corrected our understanding of Native American use of horses and domestication of canines, and clarified how Neanderthals managed risk by occupying places with unfavorable but stable climates.

2020

Meeko Oishi, professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering
Oishi, who has also worked closely with UNM’s Center for Biomedical Engineering and Center for Emerging Energy Technologies, researches cyber-physical systems that involve a tight coupling between computing units and the world in which they are deployed. Studying these systems requires tools that can mix different modes of computation related to both physics and the operations of computers. These systems often work closely with humans in safety-critical situations. Examples include self-driving cars, drones, spacecraft, power control systems and aircraft. 

Oishi’s research seeks to detect potential errors in autonomous systems, and in human interaction with autonomous systems, at the design stage, as opposed to after testing and implementation. She has also investigated interdisciplinary problems in assistive technologies, robotics, Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, management of sleep disorders and anesthesia delivery, forming important collaborations with clinicians in neuroscience, neurosurgery and sleep disorders.

To support this research program, she has created, grown, and maintained the Hybrid Systems and Controls Lab at UNM. Her program has resulted in 28 articles, a book and dozens of refereed papers and technical reports. It has been supported by $6.1 million in funding on which she was PI and an additional $42 million in funding as co-PI.

Her many honors and recognitions include an NSF CAREER Development award in 2013 and multiple best paper recognitions including the Best Paper Award in 2017 from IEEE/ACM Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control Conference.

She has also been selected to the Defense Science Study Group – which is a highly selective group of scholars who advise Department of Defense on applications of emerging science, where she is the first UNM professor selected since the 1980s.

Her research leadership has extended to an active role in training the next generation of scholars. She has graduated many Ph.D. students and master’s students. One of her students won the Best Student Paper Award in 2011 at the IEEE Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

Benjamin Clark, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences
Clark studies how the mammalian brain generates an internal sense of spatial orientation at a neurological level, with particular attention to neurons related to head direction and location within a space, as well as the relationship between these networks. His work also advances the understanding of the multiple networks involved in learning and memory. The broad aim of his work is to apply animal-based models of spatial learning and memory to further understand the structural and functional loss after prenatal exposure to alcohol and Alzheimer’s disease.

His research program has resulted in a total of 36 publications in prestigious journals, 21 of them since arriving at UNM, supported by impressive, consistent grant funding from such sources as the National Institutes of Health and the Alzheimer’s Association.

External reviewers characterized his publications as impactful and thought-provoking and particularly noted his contributions to both basic science understandings of spatial navigation and memory, as well as translational applications to Alzheimer’s disease and fetal alcohol syndrome. 

In addition, his dedication to mentorship is to be commended. Clark makes a point of featuring his trainees as co-authors. Of seven manuscripts in preparation at the time of his review, all involved trainees from his lab. His mentorship of students extends to undergraduates, some 22 of whom, plus 4 honors students, have worked in his lab.