UNM announces new Level 1 Grand Challenges

The University of New Mexico Grand Challenges program announces the addition of six new dynamic teams. The newly formed cohort of innovative teams has been competitively selected to embark on the exciting journey of the Grand Challenges Level 1 program for the upcoming year. During academic year 2025-2026, each team will receive $8,000 that can be utilized for team building, convening, and planning.

"We are thrilled to unveil our newest Level 1 concept teams, who bring a wealth of expertise and a fresh perspective to the table for all New Mexicans," Vice President for Research Ellen Fisher said. "These teams are diverse and innovative; each tackling a pressing challenge we encounter each day across our state. With the re-imagination of the UNM Grand Challenges program a few years ago, we're now realizing a truly interdisciplinary initiative that promotes a culture of collaboration and showcases the unparalleled strengths of our research university."

Teams will receive support from several UNM officers across campus in this next year and each team will work to address one of several new challenges.

"UNM's Grand Challenges are designed to address and solve New Mexico's biggest problems, so it is always exciting when we bring in new teams to take on newly identified issues facing our state," UNM President Garnett Stokes said. "I am especially pleased to see our researchers collaborating across a wide variety of disciplines, bringing a diversity of perspectives to the task of tackling some of the toughest challenges facing our communities."

New UNM Grand Challenges Level 1 Teams:

Trustworthy AI: 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.

Perinatal Care: 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.

Children's Language: 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 focused on bilingual children with language delays and deaf children acquiring signed languages.

Disaster Resilience: 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: 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.

Safer Streets: 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.

Learn more about the UNM Grand Challenges program
Grand Challenges are problems of global, national, and regional significance that require researchers to work together across disciplinary boundaries to develop and implement solutions. Grand Challenges address problems that, when solved, have a significant positive impact on people and society. These challenges are large in scale, ambitious in scope, and multidisciplinary in nature. They have carefully developed goals that enable multiple paths towards solutions, and that are relevant across varied disciplines and communities.

UNM's Grand Challenges program engages faculty, researchers, staff, and students across the University; grows and fosters a culture of collaboration and team research; increases team success by providing structured support and training; and continues to build UNM's capacity and reputation for discovery and innovation. Since the launch of the UNM Grand Challenges program in 2019 by President Garnett S. Stokes, Grand Challenges teams have achieved many of the program's goals, including greater interdisciplinary collaborations engaging researchers and students across UNM's campuses and the wider community. The program has also enabled a large increase in extramural funding - Grand Challenges teams have been associated with over $102 million in external research funding awarded to UNM since 2019.

For more information about the program, visit the Grand Challenges website.