In 2012, I was working as Education Coordinator for the Valles Caldera Trust, a small experimental federal agency charged with managing the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve (VCNP) in the Jemez Mountains. New in my position, I had taken it upon myself to overhaul VCNP education efforts and establish a tiered education program offering place-based STEM field trips to local k-12 students.
In 2014, NM EPSCoR supported the hire of Assistant Professors Dr. José Cerrato and Dr. Ricardo González-Pinzón at the UNM Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering with funds from the $20 million Energize New Mexico National Science Foundation (NSF) EPSCoR grant.
Dr. Seuss succinctly captures the anticipation and pride all mentors/parents feel when they imagine the future for those they’ve cultivated. The sentiment is no different for Janie Chermak, Professor of Economics at UNM, who has been actively involved with EPSCoR for the past eleven years.
“It’s so nice to watch them move from being a student to being a self-sufficient researcher,” Professor Chermak says from a chair in her cheerily lit office.
In the world of academia, the proof is in the publications, not the pudding – unless, of course, the publication is on pudding.
In the first year of New Mexico's last NSF EPSCoR project, the Energize New Mexico team produced 18 peer-reviewed publications. As time passed, these numbers predictably increased, with 27 in year three and 49 in year five. Now the grant is over, but papers are still being published.