Faculty Development Leave 2024-25 Awardees
The purpose of Faculty Development Leave is to enable faculty members to engage in study, research, writing, field observation, and similar projects to improve public higher education.
2024-2025 Faculty Development Leave Awardees
Rosa Alcalá, Ph.D., professor, Department of Creative Writing
An award-winning poet and translator, Dr. Rosa Alcalá has published several books of her own poems as well as translations of poetry by Latin American writers. Her proposed project will culminate in a book of poems that tells the story of a daughter of immigrants who has spent her entire life mediating—for her parents, and later for herself—between languages and cultural and class divides. Now, she must perform the ultimate act of translation, which is to understand who her mother is, even as she is losing her to dementia. Titled fray, the book considers the costs of immigration on a working-class family, the weight of the past, and the impact of a parent’s aging and death. Fray will be her fifth book of poems and the final book of a poetic trilogy that includes MyOTHER TONGUE and YOU (published in 2024). Together, these three books explore bilingualism, immigrant identity, motherhood, and the experience of women under patriarchy. Read more about Rosa Alcalá at .
Thomas A. Birkner, MFA, Associate professor, Department of Art
Thomas A. Birkner is an American postwar and contemporary painter whose work has been featured in numerous galleries and museums, including the Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco and the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. His proposed project includes the completion of two solo exhibitions at these galleries. The exhibition in San Francisco will be a continuation of a new body of work titled , first shown at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery in the fall of 2023. The first show included a wide range of subject matter, papal ceremonies, a presidential inauguration, royal pageantry, etc., and served as an introduction to the series. The exhibition in Santa Fe will be a continuation of an established series entitled DemoGraphica. Read more about Thomas Birkner at .
Maria F. Garcia, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Marketing, Management and Supply Chain
Dr. Garcia is an associate professor in the Department of Marketing, Management and Supply Chain; and director of the Center for Multicultural Management and Ethics. She has a research background in diversity issues at work, business ethics, and international human resource management. Her proposed project involves development an evidence-based maturity model focused on identifying strategies, programs, policies, and practices for increasing the representation of faculty women, and their intersectional identities, working in STEM in higher education. The goal of this project is to build knowledge on the different steps, including drivers, key processes (e.g., practices), and outcome indicators (e.g., number of women faculty as a function of number of doctoral students), higher education institutions should consider in their efforts to increase the representation in this area. Read more about Maria Garcia at .
Jorge L. Gardea-Torresdey, Ph.D., professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Dr. Jorge Gardea-Torresdey is a world leader in environmental nanotechnology and a key investigator who has authored over 500 publications. His proposed project will expand and solidify knowledge in the field of nanotechnology and agriculture through a research stay at state-of-the-art facilities, in addition to networking with U.S. and world leaders in this field. The new knowledge acquired will allow Dr. Gardea-Torresdey to better fulfill his commitments as senior investigator in his recently awarded USDA and NSF grants addressing nanotechnology, agriculture, and environmental sciences. His project will explore how nanotechnology can address the current inefficiencies in agrochemical delivery and utilization, which result in significant losses in agricultural production. Read more about Jorge Gardea-Torresdey at /science/gardea.
Lixin Jin, Ph.D., professor, Department of Earth, Environmental and Resource Sciences
Dr. Jin is a professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Resource Sciences with a research background in chemical, physical, and biological processes in natural and managed critical zone in drylands. Her proposed project focuses on understanding the fundamental structure, functions and evolution of the "critical zone" in natural and managed dryland ecosystems. The critical zone is that which lies at the Earth surface extending from the canopy to the lower limit of shallow aquifers. Her goal is to increase our capacity to quantify and predict dryland carbon budgets across land-use and climatic gradients by examining the role of water and nutrient availability in regulating the movement of organic and inorganic carbon. Her work will explore the impact climate change has on dryland carbon budgets and address the potential that natural and irrigated dryland has for carbon storage and sequestration. She will also explore optimized solutions for use of available water and energy resources in dryland agricultural practices to achieve sustainable systems within current and future natural, economic, social, and energy constraints. Read more about Dr. Jin's research at .
Michael Moody, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Biological Sciences
Dr. Moody is an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences with a research background in plant evolution and evolutionary genomics. His proposed project aims to obtain additional bioinformatics training to expand his genomics research, particularly to enhance his expertise in processing and analyzing genomic/transcriptomic data. He also aims to complete grant proposals under NSF programs and finalize publications for scientific journals. Read more about Dr. Moody at .
Melinda Tasca, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Criminal Justice and Security Studies
Dr. Tasca is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Security Studies with a research in corrections, the collateral consequences of incarceration, and disparities in the criminal justice system. Her proposed project centers on completing a large-scale grant titled The Sources and Consequences of Prison Violence, which forms the foundation of her work. This project examines rates of violent victimization within prisons and explores how exposure to such violence can have traumatic, life-altering effects with serious health, emotional, and behavioral consequences that persist long-term. These effects undermine efforts for prison reform and rehabilitation. The backdrop for this situation is an era in which policymakers, practitioners, and the public have called for greater accountability and evidence-based policies to reduce and manage violence in prisons. Despite this demand, there remains a lack of comprehensive empirical assessments on the nature, sources, and consequences of prison violence. Her project aims to fill these theoretical, empirical, and policy gaps. The completion of The Sources and Consequences of Prison Violence will lead to writing three lead authored manuscripts and continue to advance literature that can inform prison policy and practice in meaningful ways. Read more about Melinda Tasca at .
Lela Vukovic, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Dr. Vukovic is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry with a research background in computational modeling of realistic biological and materials systems. Her proposed project will focus on decoding the molecular mechanisms of carbon nanotube-based (SWNTs) biosensing of biomedically important analytes. Her study will provide insights that could promote new developments of next-generation bioanalyte sensors and revolutionize fields like chemistry, medicine, and pharmacology. She aims to combine her study of SWNTs and expertise with a host laboratory at Ruhr University, which has demonstrated an ability to measure the fluorescence emission spectra of DNA-SWNT conjugates investigated in her proposed work. Read more about her expertise at .
Yang (Sophie) Yang, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Marketing, Management and Supply Chain
Dr. Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Marketing, Management and Supply Chain with a research background in supply networks, including how supply networks affect firms' competitive actions and how supply networks change due to major events. Her proposed project will investigate how firms’ supply network structures affect their competitive actions. While supply network structures have been studied in supply chain management research, along with firms’ competitive actions in the strategic management field, the bodies of literature are mostly disconnected and the relationship between the two has been overlooked. Dr. Yang's research approach will use a comprehensive panel data set combined from three data sources: FactSet, RavenPack, and Compustat. She will study how the level of shared suppliers (i.e., structural equivalence in the supply network) between two rival firms affects their competitive actions at the dyadic level, and how the level of co-embeddedness between a firm’s competition network (a network of competitors) and its supply network affects the firm’s competitive actions. Read more about her research at .
Son-Young Yi, Ph.D., professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences
Dr. Yi is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences with a research interest in addressing scientific and technical challenges associated with two mitigation solutions for climate change that can help reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere: geologic carbon storage and enhanced geothermal systems. Building on her current research which is to create computational models that can efficiently and effectively resolve the fine-scale information of multiscale phenomena and geological heterogeneity in macroscale simulations for subsurface energy systems, Dr. Yi's proposed project will focus on building accurate yet fast computational simulators for geologic carbon storage and enhanced geothermal systems by leveraging innovative multi-physics machine learning technologies on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. Read more about her research at .