New Mexico State University

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

This Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) will build significant capacity and infrastructure for research and education in materials at NMSU, complementing an existing pathway towards careers in national nuclear security. Through targeted recruiting and retention activities at all levels, enrollment, graduation rates, and graduate school transfers of students in materials-related fields will increase significantly. By engaging undergraduate students in specially designed research projects, the loss of talent at the transition to graduate school will be narrowed. The outcome will be a highly skilled workforce ready to tackle regional, national, and global materials problems in industry, academia, or government, especially related to advanced semiconductor manufacturing or clean energy solutions. The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) partner institution will benefit from access to a talented pool of graduate applicants. The research results obtained in this partnership will be published in joint peer-reviewed journal articles and presented at conferences, with authors from both institutions, including students. Data will be published or shared with other researchers. The public will benefit from novel devices built on quantum materials and processes. Regional public and private employers will see an increasingly skilled labor pool, which will contribute to the economic development in New Mexico. This project is partially supported with co-funding from the Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) for the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). NMSU in Las Cruces, New Mexico, proposes to enter into a partnership with the Quantum Foundry at UCSB, supported by Division of Materials Research. This Partnership for Research and Education on Quantum Materials and Processes (PREQ) will focus on materials research in two cohesive interdisciplinary thrusts with eleven faculty members at both institutions related to (1) the superconductivity of ruthenates and their heterostructures and (2) the infrared optical response of topological insulators and semimetals. Joint research at both partner institutions will advance knowledge in feedback loops involving materials synthesis, device fabrication, quantum transport, optical characterization, and density functional theory, enabling novel electronic and photonic devices and applications. Engineered Cooper pair/polaron heterostructures will be grown by pulsed laser deposition and laser molecular beam epitaxy to control ruthenate superconductivity. The infrared and quantum transport response of semimetals and topological insulators will be documented, using strained α-tin alloyed with Ge as an example. This PREM will broaden participation of students in materials research and education through targeted high school and community college recruiting and outreach followed by social and academic integration activities, including research of PREM faculty members with undergraduate and graduate students, and exchange of students and faculty researchers between both institutions. The PREM activities will be assessed by an external advisory board consisting of senior materials researchers, employers, and academic administrators. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

This research program aims to use extended emission line nebulae to map out the variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN) over timescales from ten thousand to one hundred thousand years, and at the same time, to make the graduate school environment work better for today’s students. Extended nebulae illuminate the circumgalactic gas that is fueling and being impacted by galaxy and black hole growth. The principal investigator and students at New Mexico State University will (1) build an efficient search algorithm for finding AGN-powered emission line nebulae in the local universe, (2) map out the ionization histories of the central AGN powering the emission, and (3) study the host galaxies, circumgalactic gas, and local environments around AGN with a range of ionization histories. The environment of graduate school has a profound impact on students, both professionally and psychologically. This proposal will address this through (1) the development of a workshop to guide students in acquiring versatile research skills and in strengthening their mental health, and (2) the creation of a writing group to foster the consistent writing that develops scientific thinking, produces scientific contributions in timely manner, and enhances overall morale. AGN are known to be highly variable, but our understanding of the factors that influence AGN over long timescales (10^4 – 10^5 years) is quite limited. Extended emission line nebulae are the key to probing variability on these timescales, but biases exist in current samples, and we are only beginning to understand how this glowing circumgalactic material and the local environment fuel and are impacted by the central galaxy and AGN. This program will advance knowledge by using recent public surveys and a morphological search algorithm to expand the known sample of AGN-powered nebulae to fainter targets and a broader range of ionization histories, i.e., without being biased by the current luminosity of the associated AGN. Leveraging the greater amount of time available on longslit/multislit instruments on 3-4m class telescopes, the researchers will obtain deep, spatially-resolved spectroscopy and constrain AGN ionization histories over these longer timescales. The program will also provide insight into the influence of the host galaxy, local environment, and kinematics of the surrounding gas that, when combined with studies of the more distant universe, will contribute to our understanding of how AGN variability and the circumgalactic gas reservoir change over cosmic time. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Our daily functioning relies on our ability to recognize objects, control our attention, and encode events in memory, although much is still unknown about these critical mental processes. The Object Perception, Attention, and Memory (OPAM) conference is a nationally-recognized venue for early-career scientists to present cutting-edge research on these very topics, employing a variety of experimental techniques such as behavioral methods, neuroimaging, computational modeling, animal models, and more. Research on these cognitive processes is essential for developing a better understanding of the human mind and brain, and the OPAM conference has over 30 years of history as a leader in this area. The current project aims to amplify OPAM's impact on the field by broadening who is participating in the meeting, by providing critical networking and career guidance, and by offering easily-accessible professional training. All of these initiatives are free of charge to the scientific community, and help prepare early-career scientists to study these important topics effectively in the future. The OPAM conference is held as an affiliate meeting of the Psychonomic Society’s annual conference. The current project increases financial support available for conference presenters, particularly to reach the "missing millions" in STEM. Principal Investigators and conference organizers also engage in a series of outreach efforts to narrow the gap between the demographics of the research community at OPAM and in the cognitive sciences more broadly and the demographics of the whole nation. A new keynote speaker format has been adopted in which the speaker shares experiences from their early-career stage that will inspire and guide other early-career researchers. A “Lunch with an Expert” event allows attendees to learn about scientific topics and receive career guidance from established experts in a friendly setting. Outside of the conference itself, OPAM hosts online workshops throughout the year, focusing on topics critical to the professional development and technical skill-building of early-career researchers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-08

This research measures message content consistency among U.S. federal and state public health agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic. It then tests whether such message content consistency is associated with the diffusion of discordant information on social media. It also tests whether or not compliance with public health recommendations is related with message content consistency. Data include tweets from X (formerly known as Twitter), survey data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, and experimental data from survey participants. The project uses a three-pronged methodological approach: computational text analysis, a survey, and a survey experiment. With these research tools, it investigates the conditions, demographics, and mechanisms behind the relationship between message inconsistency and the spread of discordant health information in the American public. The study begins with a construction of a tweet corpus comprising COVID-19 pandemic-related tweets from 68 federal and state public health agencies. Using techniques such as word embeddings, binary classifiers, and regression analysis, it measures the relationship between message consistency in original agency tweets and the prevalence of discordant information in associated quote-tweets. Next, using a nationally representative survey with a survey experiment component, the study explores how exposure to inconsistent tweets regarding a (relatively unknown) disease impacts people’s trust in the information being presented and their willingness to follow various public health guidelines. This survey is used to gage exposure to discordant public health information and message content inconsistency among U.S. adults, using an evocation-based measurement strategy to understand trust dynamics during emergency situations. Rigorous survey procedures, including psychometric tests and expert feedback, ensure the validity and reliability of collected data, with potential implications for future studies or public health crises. This project is jointly funded by the Sociology Program, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Program, and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-08

This project will use measurements of the Sun obtained with the Dunn Solar Telescope (DST) in New Mexico and many other telescopes to study the origin and evolution of jets emanating from coronal holes. These jets are large regions of less dense and cooler material some of which may produce high speed solar wind streams that hit the Earth as geomagnetic storms. The investigators will focus on jets that are observed on the edges of coronal holes and testing whether they are related to chromospheric spicule-type jets that often emerge from the same location. This project also provides support for two senior graduate students and four undergraduate students primarily from minority backgrounds, who will analyze the data to identify and track jet-like features. The team will also provide public outreach to the Sunspot Visitor Center. To accomplish this research, the investigators will use 45 datasets already obtained using imaging and spectral information from the DST, Interferometric BIdimensional Spectrometer (IBIS), Facility InfraRed Spectropolarimeter (FIRS), Spectro-Polarimeter for INfrared and Optical Regions (SPINOR), Solar Dynamic Observatory Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (SDO AIA), Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument and Interface region imaging spectrograph (IRIS). They will trace the coronal hole jets and their properties across different atmospheric regions. Students will receive training in telescope operation, communicating science, writing, and computer programming. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-08

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Educational Instrumentation (EI) project aims to acquire cutting-edge computing equipment to strengthen Computer Science (CS) education, empowering students at New Mexico State University (NMSU) to pursue successful careers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cybersecurity. With NMSU serving a diverse student body—58% women and 59% Hispanic/Latino—the equipment will support over ten specialized CS courses, benefiting approximately 200 students. It will integrate course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) and enable faculty to design materials that cultivate proficiency in modern computing hardware. This initiative promises year-round access to resources for student projects, homework, and research, enhancing their practical skills and readiness for careers in AI and Cybersecurity. This project will equip virtual and in-person classrooms with state-of-the-art (SOTA) servers and robots to support education in five key domains: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Cybersecurity, Human-robot Interaction, and Introductory CS. As AI and Cybersecurity gain global prominence, the demand for high-performance servers and GPUs intensifies due to complex computational tasks and system vulnerabilities. This project will procure advanced servers, some equipped with GPU cards, robots, security gateways, and AI accelerator cards. These resources will be strategically deployed across multiple educational domains: (i) Servers featuring high-performance GPU cards will support courses in AI and ML. (ii) Servers without GPU cards and dedicated security gateways will be tailored for hands-on cybersecurity training. (iii) Advanced robots will be utilized in courses focusing on human-robot interaction. (iv) Servers without GPU cards and AI accelerators will be dedicated to introductory CS courses. By integrating these cutting-edge technologies into the curriculum, students will gain practical experience alongside theoretical knowledge. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-08

This initiative is a collaboration among four minority-serving institutions: New Mexico State University, the University of New Mexico, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and Navajo Technical University. The project will build the underpinnings for an advanced distributed intelligent additive manufacturing (DIAM) infrastructure. The broad vision of this project is to make foundational innovations in distributed networking, cybersecurity, and digital-twin design in additive manufacturing (AM) leading to the creation of robust research programs in AM in New Mexico. This, in turn, will spur the creation of a diverse, well-trained workforce that will make New Mexico competitive in AM. The project will establish the Center for Distributed Resilient and Emergent intelligence-based Additive Manufacturing (DREAM) to make distributed AM a reality. This initiative aligns with New Mexico’s Economic Development and Science & Technology plans. The resulting democratization of manufacturing will spur inclusive economic growth in the state and contribute to national efforts to onshore manufacturing. The project capitalizes on several strengths in New Mexico. The state has a diverse higher education system, collaborative federal laboratories, an engaged private sector, and state funding interests aligned with the DREAM project. The proposed research will establish the groundwork for DIAM by developing the networking and security framework essential to AM and Industry 4.0 contexts. DREAM aims to develop a successful research center, utilizing expertise from various sectors, to cultivate an advanced AM infrastructure. The Center will become an epicenter of expertise in intelligent AM driven by the following intellectual merit: (1) assessing architectural challenges in DIAM networking and security, and proposing a scalable, cloud-edge continuum blueprint through software virtualization and containerization; (2) addressing security and trust needs in DIAM, and proposing frameworks to overcome challenges; (3) ensuring verifiability and auditability of DIAM; and (4) building a novel distributed testbed infrastructure with a digital twin to refine networking, security, and communication processes for DIAM support. Collaborations with research universities across the state, national laboratories, and industry will contribute to the project’s long-term success. While AM educational initiatives are currently found in college-level engineering courses, DREAM's efforts will be unique. The project will provide an integrated pathway, starting with middle school and continuing to the doctoral and post-doctoral levels. Additionally, DREAM's educational models will be intertwined with research experiences and infused with pedagogical models that promote diversity, inclusion, and belonging. This project is poised to make significant contributions to the fields of AM, cybersecurity, and education, ultimately strengthening New Mexico's economic and technological landscape. This project is funded by the NSF EPSCoR Research Incubators for STEM Excellence (E-RISE) RII Program. The E-RISE RII Program supports the development and implementation of sustainable broad networks of individuals, institutions, and organizations that will transform the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research capacity and competitiveness in a jurisdiction within a field of research aligned with the jurisdiction's science and technology priorities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-08

Climate change is affecting communities across the United States. It is causing water shortages for drinking and farming, and it also makes it hard to keep water clean and protect aquatic life. These issues impact everyone, regardless of financial status. They are particularly harsh on communities without proper infrastructure to prepare for, adapt to, and recover from water management problems, leading to economic losses and the loss of historic homelands. Extreme conditions can also cause harmful substances to spread beyond already contaminated areas. This project focuses on the Lakota Tribe in South Dakota, the Navajo Tribe in New Mexico, and flood-prone farming communities in Vermont. These groups are experiencing more frequent and intense droughts, wildfires, and floods. To address these challenges, we need to create intelligent and affordable systems to monitor water quantity and quality, using Indigenous knowledge and easy-to-use sensors to detect and measure pollutants in real-time. This collaboration, called Advancing Quality and Climate-Resilient Water Management with Community Partnerships and Enhanced Sensor Network (AQUA-CLIME), aims to help the Lakota Tribe, the Navajo Tribe, and Vermont farmers manage water quality and quantity issues caused by climate change. AQUA-CLIME will engage research experts, practicing professionals, and Indigenous communities from the University of Vermont and Norwich University in Vermont, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota, and New Mexico State University and Navajo Technical University in New Mexico. AQUA-CLIME will create a climate change research network involving people, equipment, and technology. It will enable smooth cooperation among Native American communities, farmers, students, teachers, industry groups, state agencies, and nonprofits. The project will also support career development for about 350 people, including 25 faculty researchers, 12 graduate students, 25 undergraduates, and 300 middle and high school students. The technical outcomes from this project would reveal underlying knowledge gaps about climate change impacts on water quality and quantity facing Indigenous tribes and agricultural communities in the three participating jurisdictions and broadly applicable to the U.S. The convergence research infrastructure guided by Indigenous knowledge is expected to yield fundamental insights to address data knowledge gaps and generate timely, actionable information for contaminants identification, quantification, mitigation, and communication. Outcomes from the work would include: (i) an integrated data science framework for monitoring contaminants under diverse climate change scenarios; (ii) a spatially distributed network of affordable, printable sensors and surrogate sensors for monitoring contaminants in watershed; (iii) data fusion methods for analyzing complex interactions among climate change scenarios and contaminant source/sink dynamics; (iv) strategies for integrating sensor networks for effective and equitable management of water resources; (v) functionalization strategies for obtaining smaller and yet smarter microsensors. The project will build community-academic partnerships that will contribute to a climate-resilient water management solutions for securing water quality and quantity, develop a future-ready expert workforce, and positively impact the socioeconomic status of disadvantaged communities in the three jurisdictions. This project is funded by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement-Focused EPSCoR Collaborations (RII-FEC) program. The RII-FEC program builds inter-jurisdictional collaborative teams of EPSCoR investigators in focus areas consistent with the NSF Strategic Plan. RII-FEC projects include researchers from at least two EPSCoR eligible jurisdictions with complementary expertise and resources necessary to address challenges, which neither party could address as well or as rapidly independently. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-07

This project investigates the role of bats and their consumption of plant-eating insects in a region where shrubs are replacing grasses in the southwestern United States, the most bat-diverse region in the country. Grasslands in many desert or semi-desert regions around the world are becoming dominated by woody plants or shrubs and bare ground. Such changes in the plant community can be good but are more likely to be bad for animals living in these environments. Certain animals may even influence how quickly grasses are replaced by shrubs. However, for most species, these relationships are unknown. By eating insects, bats reduce the need for pesticides in agricultural systems, and can benefit plant health in other ecosystems. This project will help develop ideas and plans to protect and promote healthy grasslands and wildlife communities. In addition, this project will provide hands-on research experiences for diverse undergraduate and graduate students. This project will monitor bat and arthropod interactions across a grass–shrub gradient in the northern Chihuahuan Desert to evaluate how insectivorous bats are affected by—and potentially influence—shrub encroachment in arid landscapes. Research will be conducted at the Jornada Basin Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in southern New Mexico, leveraging a variety of long-term experiments and datasets. The researchers first aim to quantify species-specific bat activity using acoustic recorders across habitats that are grass-dominated, shrub-dominated, or in the grass–shrub transition zone. Bats will also be captured across these habitats to collect fecal samples that will be molecularly analyzed to determine what insects are present in their diets. The researchers expect that shrub encroachment reduces habitat complexity and potential arthropod food opportunities, and thus diminishes arthropod species richness and abundance. This may in turn reduce the species richness, foraging activity, and diet diversity among the bats preying on those arthropods. The researchers will also measure the indirect effects of bats on woody plant success in at-risk grasslands. Reductions in insects and herbivory will be quantified by comparing areas from which bats are excluded and control sites within habitats that are grass-dominated, shrub-dominated, or in the grass–shrub transition zone. This project is jointly funded by the Population and Community Ecology cluster in the Division of Environmental Biology, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and the Division of Biological Infrastructure. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-06

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 2 project aims to address the lack of representation and educational challenges faced by students in STEM fields at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The goal is to create a more inclusive and empowering learning environment in chemistry classrooms, focusing on empowering students' success and sense of belonging in STEM education. The project's innovative approach integrates active learning methodologies and a student-centered framework (or "Servingness") which aims to foster students' ability to navigate their multiple defining identities including STEM identities. This project will design, implement, and evaluate a new introductory chemistry curriculum that encourages students to navigate between their cultural identity and STEM research. The project will use a proven active learning curriculum called Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) and strategically introduce servingness-enhancing structures. The objectives are 1) examine how different instructional structures surrounding a POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) curriculum implementation either facilitate the academic success of STEM students or present barriers to the cultivation and pursuit of their educational goals, competencies, attitudes, and border crossing; and 2) identify the attributes that define successful culturally relevant pedagogy interventions within the college context and determine the culturally pertinent subjects that resonate with students from the New Mexico region. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.