2025 Level 1 teams

The University of New Mexico’s Grand Challenges program introduces six new teams!

The teams, selected through a competitive application process, represent the breadth of research and innovation at UNM, with main, health sciences, and branch campuses all represented. Supporting UNM’s commitment to serve the people of New Mexico, the newly formed and growing interdisciplinary research teams will address topics that are of the utmost importance to our state. The Level 1 program will provide a year of team building and strategic planning support. Team abstracts and conveners are listed below. For more information or to connect with teams, please contact grandchallenges@unm.edu.

Children’s Language

Co-conveners: Naomi Shin, Carlos Irizarry

Most research on child language development has focused on ~1.5 percent of the world’s languages and only considered monolingual children. Even less research has included bilingual children with language delays or deaf children acquiring signed languages.

The children’s language team will work to increase understanding of linguistic diversity and language development by focusing on bilingual children, including those with language delays, deaf children acquiring signed languages, and Indigenous children acquiring their traditional languages.

Disaster Resilience

Co-conveners: Christopher Dyer, Roberta Lavin

Today, significant climate change and disaster-driven events occur that undermine community resilience and increase vulnerability to life-threatening forces. Such events occur under the worldwide phenomenon of disaster compression, where more frequent and severe disasters leave communities struggling to recover completely.

The Disaster Resilience team will develop a multidisciplinary community-based disaster resilience training, recovery, and capacity-building approach to mitigate disaster compression throughout New Mexico.

Gaining Time

Co-conveners: Corinne Myers, Felisa Smith, Jason Moore

Researchers seek to understand how a change in climate that occurs over thousands of years influences an ecosystem whose living components respond in seconds to years. The team intends to explore the fundamental disconnect between “deep” timescales (thousands to billions of years), where we best observe and understand patterns of environmental change that shape the history of life on Earth, and the near timescales (seconds to centuries), where we best observe and understand the organisms that respond to, or produce these patterns.

Unifying near-to-deep time perspectives to understand our changing planet, the Gaining Time team will work to improve predictions and strategies for managing the outcomes of environmental change on the biosphere.

Perinatal Care

Co-conveners: Abigail Reese, Trevor Quiner

Lack of accessible care for birthing families is a significant and worsening problem in New Mexico with significant implications for equitable and safe maternal and newborn health outcomes.

The Perinatal Care team will work to ensure equitable, safe and accessible perinatal services for rural communities. Engagement with rural communities will be foundational to identifying solutions.

Safer Streets

Co-conveners: Lisa Losada-Rojas, Alexander Webb

Reducing road fatalities is a critical public health priority, as traffic crashes are among the leading causes of human death worldwide. Across the U.S., road fatalities have increased 30% over the last ten years. For several years New Mexico has had the highest rate of pedestrian fatalities in the country and has been in the top ten for bicyclist fatalities.

The Safer Streets team will investigate the rise in road fatalities and the overall design of our transportation systems to understand why New Mexico streets are sometimes unsafe. This analysis will enable the team to begin developing targeted interventions in an effort to improve public safety.

Trustworthy AI

Co-conveners: Melanie Moses, Stephanie Moore, Sonia Gipson Rankin

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has tremendous impact on national and global economies and has upended traditional education and research paradigms. While AI promises to unleash a new era of scientific innovation, it also presents new societal challenges by producing misinformation, hallucinating inaccurate answers, and perpetuating bias and discrimination.

The Trustworthy AI team seeks to develop artificial intelligence systems that are provably and practically trustworthy.