Alan’s Monday Message for July 31st
Today is the last day of July. In a little over two weeks, we will be welcoming the new class of 2027 and our returning students, faculty, and staff. I can’t wait for the start of the new academic year. On Monday morning, I attended the President’s Executive meeting. This is President Gogue’s executive team and we meet every Monday morning from 9am to 10am. The executive team comprises Leslie Cervantes, Chief of Staff; Sherry Kollmann, Chancellor of Global; Monica Torres, Chancellor of the Community Colleges; D’Anne Stuart, Interim VP for Business/Finance; Scott Fields, Interim General Counsel; Justin Bannister, Associate VP for Marketing and Communications, and myself. After the executive meeting, I had a number of 1:1 meetings before ending my day with an IACUC meeting and attending to administrative duties.
On Tuesday, I had a number of 1:1 meetings along with the Deans meeting. To start my Wednesday, I met with D’Anne Stuart, Kim Rumford, and James McAteer to review how the Provost’s office wants to use the $1.169M the state gave NMSU to support faculty salary issues. For the rest of the day, I had more 1:1 meetings. After lunch, I attended Gary Nichols’s retirement party at PSL for a short time and wished him well. Gary retired at the end of June and worked at PSL for over 30 years. Afterwards, the Deans and I met with President Gogue. He gave some insights to the Deans about institutional priorities. Following this, Deans Iwasaki and Camarena met with James McAteer and myself to address a new MOU for the MALCS journal. We are making progress and hope to get it resolved in the near future. I finished my day doing administrative tasks and attending a meeting with President Gogue, Faculty Senate Chair Gaylene Fasenko, and Employee Council Chair Susanne Berger. We discussed the campus climate and ways to improve it as well as all the ways to report complaints to ELR, Ethics Point, Faculty Grievance Review Board, and Office of Institutional Equity. Each entity has specific charges for addressing certain types of complaints.
On Thursday and Friday, I spent most of the days involved with the University System Budget Committee to review Research and Public Service Project (RPSP) proposals. We heard presentations and reviewed 26 proposals under consideration. During various parts of those two days, I had to step out for 1:1 meetings on Thursday and the ACES leadership retreat on Friday morning. To end my work week, I drove back to Farm and Ranch to catch the last part of the ACES leadership retreat. I am continuously impressed by everyone in ACES and their commitment to serving students and all the New Mexico counties through cooperative extension and experimental science stations. I am looking forward to my upcoming road trip to eastern New Mexico to visit Artesia, Roswell, Portales, Clovis, Tucumcari, Santa Rosa, and Tularosa.
In addition to my weekly activities, I continued to work on an op-ed I am submitting to marketing and communications to appear in the Las Cruces Sun-News at the beginning of the academic year entitled, “A New Dawn at NMSU: The Future is Bright.” I am fortunate to see across campus all the exciting things happening. This year we are welcoming close to 50 new faculty members and what may turn out to be one of the largest freshmen classes in NMSU history. Please welcome all our new faculty and students when you get a chance. It is the little things we do to build a better community that go a long way towards improving our culture, faculty morale, and campus climate. If you are interested in volunteering to help our undergraduate students move in on Saturday, August 12th or Sunday, August 13th, please contact Housing at 575-646-3202 or email housing@nmsu.edu with the number of volunteers and they will give you a slot that they’re needed. I am planning to take a shift on Saturday around noon time. I am looking forward to helping our new students move in and get acclimated. It brings back good memories of when I helped move in my son and daughter into their dormitories.
NMSU’s Unsung Heroes
This week, I did not receive any recipients for being NMSU Unsung Hero.
Kudos
Dr. Gaurav Panwar was recognized as a hero by Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima for his service on the Mesilla Valley Search and Rescue (a volunteer group) which recently rescued a group of hikers off of the Needles in the Organ Mountains. Gaurav is currently a Senior Enterprise Programmer Analyst with ICT and will begin his new position as a tenure track Assistant Professor in Computer Science this fall. Congratulations Gaurav. NMSU is proud of you!
Vice President for Research and Economic Development Luis Cifuentes shared good news that Drs. Cecilia Contreras (PI) and Luis Garcia (co-PI) received a three-year, $500,000 NSF award entitled, “HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: Latinidad STEM Program.” Congratulations Cecilia and Luis on your NSF award. Thank you for advancing NMSU’s vision to be a R1 institution.
Astronomy Professor Nancy Chanover informed me about a recognition that some Astronomy staff members will be receiving early next week. The NMSU Astronomy Department is home to the Atmospheres Node of NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS), which is a distributed archive that contains all data returned to Earth by NASA’s planetary missions throughout the solar system. At NMSU we archive all data related to planetary atmospheres. I have been the PI of the Atmospheres Node since 2016, and before me it was led by Dr. Reta Beebe from 1995-2015. In recognition of our advances in the data archiving area, the PDS as a whole was recently awarded the NASA Silver Team Award as part of their Agency Honor Awards; this is one of the highest honors that teams of civil servants and contractors can receive. One of our staff members is currently at a meeting in Maryland where the certificates are being distributed, and I will be passing them out to our Atmospheres Node personnel at a staff meeting on Monday July 31 at 10:00 am in Astronomy Building Room 119. The PDS Atmospheres Node is currently a $5.1M award to NMSU and we fill an important role in the planetary data community, and I look forward to having the opportunity to showcase it to the NMSU community.
VPR Luis Cifuentes shared with leadership that College of Business Dean Bryan Ashenbaum received close to half a million dollars from Los Alamos National Laboratory to support a finance and controller MBA program. This is very exciting and a great example of the MBA program adapting to meet the needs of their industry partner.
