Endowed Lectureships

Endowed lectureships provide an ideal mechanism to honor alumni, distinguished faculty and friends of the Department and to support visitations by world-class scholars to the University campus.  These scholars present cutting-edge research in seminars and short-courses.  The events enrich UNM students and faculty and the visiting scholar has the opportunity to learn of the unique cultural aspects of UNM, Albuquerque and New Mexico.

Generous contributions from donors, faculty and friends have led to the establishment of two permanent endowed lectureships:  the Milton Kahn Endowed Lectureship and the Riley Schaeffer Endowed Lectureship.  The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology encourages its alumni and friends to continue to support these lectureships and to consider the establishment of new lectureships.  Information regarding support for an existing Lectureship or initiation of a new Lectureship may be obtained through the Department Administrator, Deborah Moore, at moored@unm.edu.

Milton Kahn Lectureship in Chemistry

This Lectureship was established in 1980 in honor of Prof. Milton Kahn through generous contributions from his family as well as friends.  Prof. Kahn joined the faculty at UNM in 1948 as an Assistant Professor and he rose through the academic ranks to become Professor in 1958.  Prof. Kahn had a distinguished research career centered in radiochemistry and he was a much beloved teacher, mentor and friend of many students and colleagues over 32 years of service to UNM.  The recipients of the lectureship have generally been prominent radiochemists and physical chemists.

• 2007-2008, Prof. George C. Schatz, Northwestern University
• 2008-2009, Prof. Art Nozik, National Renewable Energy Laboratory/University of Colorado Boulder
• 2009-2010, Don G. Truhlar, University of Minnesota

Riley Schaeffer Endowed Lectureship in Chemistry

This lectureship was established in 2008 in honor of Professor riley Schaeffer through contributions from UNM faculty, past students of Professor Schaeffer at Indiana University and UNM and friends and external colleagues.  Professor Schaeffer began his academic career at Iowa State University in 1952 as an Assistant Professor and he became Associate Professor with tenure in 1956.  In 1958 he was recruited to join the faculty at Indiana University where he became Professor in 1962.  After a highly productive career at IU, including a stint as departmental Chair, 1967-1972, he accepted the position of Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wyoming in 1976.  He was recruited from that position to UNM where he served as Department of Chemistry Chairperson from 1981-1987 and he retired from UNM in 1992.  Under his able leadership as Chair, Prof. Schaeffer guided the hiring and mentoring of a number of new faculty who have gone on to highly productive careers.  Professor Schaeffer has also had a distinguished research record that includes critical discoveries in the synthesis, reactivity and structure analysis, via x-ray diffraction and NMR methods, of boron hydrides and carboranes.  Professor Schaeffer received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; he is an AAAS Fellow and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Britain.

Inaugural Endowed Lecture

The inaugural R. Schaeffer Lecture was presented by Professor Carlos J. Bustamante of the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley on October 31, 2008.  Professor Bustamante was the first Assistant Professor hired by Professor Schaeffer when he joined the UNM Chemistry Department as Chairperson in 1981.  The title of Professor Bustamante’s lecture was “Grabbing the Cat by the Tail:  Following the Packaging of DNA by a Tailored Phage, One Virus at a Time.”  A colorful pictorial representation of the process is shown here.

Some biographical background on our inaugural lecturer is provided below.

Carlos Bustamante received a B.S. degree from Cayetano Heredia University in Lima, Peru, a Masters in Biochemistry from San Marcos University, and a Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley.  His first academic appointment was as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of New Mexico beginning August, 1982.  He was awarded a Searle-Scholarship in 1984 and he received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1985.  He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 1986.  In 1986 he was appointed as a UNM Presidential Lecturer, and in 1989 he was named a State of New Mexico Eminent Scholar and promoted to the rank of Professor.  In 1991 he joined the faculty at the University of Oregon as Professor of Chemistry.  Since 1994, Dr. Bustamante has held an appointment as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.  In 1998, he became the director for the Advanced Microscopies Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Professor of Physics, Chemistry, and Molecular & Cell Biology at UC Berkeley.  His research interests include single molecule manipulation methods and their application for the investigation of various biochemical processes:  torque measurements on single DNA molecules, reversible folding of single RNA and protein molecules by force, and the mechanochemistry of nucleic-acid binding molecular motors.  He was nominated as America’s Best in Time magazine (2001), received the Biological Physics Prize of the American Physical Society (2002), and accepted the Alexander Hollaender Award in Biophysics from the National Academy of Science (2004).  He also received the Hans Neurath Prize of the Protein Society (2004), the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award by the American Association of Physics Teachers (2005), and an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) from the University of Chicago (2005).  Dr. Bustamante has given well over 400 presentations and lectures and has published over 200 papers in several journals such as PNAS, Nature, Science, and Cell.  He has served as a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Searle Scholars Program and he is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences.  He has also served in the Science Advisory Committee of the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, and is on their Board of Directors.  Dr. Bustamante holds several other advisory roles within the University of California, Berkeley and the larger scientific community.

Following the inaugural lecture on October 31, a reception was held that celebrated the careers to date of these two key figures in the evolution of the UNM Department of Chemistry.  Some photos taken from the lecture and reception are provided here.  We thank Dr. Lisa Whalen, Dr. Sylvie Pailloux, Ms. Alisha Ray and Professor Arlan Norman for these photos.