Notes from the Dec. 5, 2006 Regents Meeting

ALBUQUERQUE, Dec. 5, 2006 – The New Mexico Tech Board of Regents, convening for its last regular monthly meeting of 2006, conferred emeritus status on longtime humanities professor Carole Z. Yee, who is retiring after 30 years of service at the state-supported research university in Socorro.

During the university governing board’s November 28 meeting in Albuquerque, several New Mexico Tech administrators lauded Yee, citing among other things her instrumental role in establishing the university’s technical communication degree program, as well as her more recent work spearheading the campus-wide efforts toward the school’s reaccreditation.

Yee, who also is the Dean of Students and associate vice president of academic affairs at the university, plans on relocating after her retirement to the Los Angeles area to be closer to her immediate family.

In other official actions taken at the meeting, the New Mexico Tech Board of Regents voted unanimously to approve a revision to its Open Meetings Act Resolution for the university, allowing the school’s board of regents to conduct emergency as well as non-emergency meetings through telephone conferences when necessary.

The board of regents also approved the recent academic appointments of New Mexico Tech alumna Michaelann Shortencarier Tartis to the full-time, tenure-track faculty position of assistant professor of chemical engineering and Mehrdad (Mohammad Reza) Razavi to the full-time, tenure-track faculty position of assistant professor of mineral engineering.

In addition, New Mexico Tech President Daniel H. López informed the regents at the meeting that preliminary figures obtained by the Tech Admission Office on next year’s applicant pool indicate a projected slight increase for Fall Semester 2007 enrollment, particularly among the entering freshman class.

Tech President López also told the board of regents that VeriTrax Corporation is considering leasing a building at the university’s research and industrial park to expand the private company’s operations. VeriTrax specializes in providing its clients with proprietary software that embeds electronic media advertisements with encoding that captures, records and verifies pertinent data associated with paid commercials that are commonly broadcast.

The university president also gave the New Mexico Tech Board of Regents a brief overview of what state universities can expect in the way of issues, funding, and capital projects which will be considered by the New Mexico State Legislature during its 60-day session early next year.

In addition, López also reported that New Mexico Tech researchers involved in a geothermal drilling project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy have begun drilling an exploration test well near campus in hopes of eventually providing the university with a reliable and relatively inexpensive source of heating and cooling for its buildings.

Other announcements made during the November 2006 meeting of the New Mexico Tech Board of Regents included:

The New Mexico Tech Board of Regents also was given a detailed analysis of financial activity at the university during the past month of October, as well as several reports about recent purchasing contracts made by the university with restricted funds, including a $381,388 contract with DOSECC, Inc. for geothermal well drilling, a $204,151 sub-contract with Trex Enterprises for the “Prototype Design of Zeolite Membrane Reverse Osmosis Distillation Unit” project, a $279,000 sub-contract to Caltech for the “Research and Studies Supporting Rapid Systems Engineering and Innovation” project, and a $151,621 contract awarded to the University of Cincinnati for the “Development of Nanocrystalline Doped-Ceramic Enabled Fiber Sensors for High-Temperature In-situ Monitoring of Fossil Fuel Gases” program.