‘Collaboration’ and ‘advancement of knowledge’ key for faculty-student mentorship at UNM

For four years, the UNM's Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) has been shining a spotlight on extraordinary research faculty who exemplify outstanding mentorship and collaboration with students throughout the academic year through the Faculty Mentored Research Award. This year, the OVPR are thrilled to celebrate the achievements of:

• Honors College Associate Professor Jason Moore | Biology Undergraduate Ian Hutchinson
• Department of Spanish and Portuguese Assistant Professor Jessica Carey-Webb | Portuguese & Art History Undergraduate Natalie Rovello

This recognition not only highlights their exceptional commitment to fostering academic growth but also inspires others to engage in meaningful mentorship and collaborative research experiences.

The Projects

Jason Moore | Ian Hutchinson
Associate Professor Moore has spent that last seven years working to find ways to increase undergraduate involvement in research activity. He believes engaging in research at the undergraduate level is a "transformative opportunity for students, and one that becomes even more so with the opportunity to engage in research for extended periods while establishing an identity as a researcher."

Moore's research interests prominently include paleontology, an interest that led Hutchinson asking for ways to get involved his freshman year at UNM. In addition to his paleontological work, Moore was one of the developers of the Expanding Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (ECURE) project. This initiative is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is strategically designed to enhance the undergraduate educational experience in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics at UNM.

Hutchinson quickly became an integral student of Professor Moore's research lab, where an impactful collaboration with Moore began to take shape. This partnership provided Hutchinson with the opportunity to acquire a comprehensive understanding of fundamental research processes, thereby laying a solid foundation for his future contributions to the field.

"I started Ian off working on a straightforward project for which I had developed the scientific framework - completing the description of a Late Cretaceous microfossil locality from Montana and comparing that with other localities of a similar age," Moore said. "This taught him to gather background, failure and iteration, analysis and ambiguity, but I got the sense that the scope of the project was smaller than he would have liked."

The following summer, Hutchinson's dedication and thirst for research experiences landed him in Paraguay for the summer to take part in the the Future Fossils on Fans project; in which Hutchinson's part of the project would be looking at animal trackways along a fluvial megafan.

"By gathering data on abundance and presence of certain organisms within different sub-environments along a fluvial megafan, we can see how geological inferences impact vertebrate ecology, and from there, compare it to fossil trackway analogs that have preserved along extinct megafans.," Hutchinson said. Research requires data across various special and temporal avenues and can provide information on subjects that many never even think to consider."

Moore and Hutchinson say they both say they have a fundamental belief in the critical importance of collaboration in research endeavors, that without a collaborative approach a significant amount of valuable insights and discoveries would be overlooked, ultimately hindering the advancement of knowledge.

"Working with Ian has cemented my view that early and extended research experiences for undergraduates are an incredibly important educational tool," Moore said.

This led Moore to receiving funding that has allowed him to support bringing seven UNM undergraduates and one graduate student to the wildest and most remote parts of Paraguay for our 2025 and 2026 field seasons.

Jessica Carey-Webb | Natalie Rovello
Assistant Professor Carey-Webb has mentored Rovello throughout her undergraduate career through a range of upper-division Portuguese courses. Carey-Webb's passion for research and scholarship focus on the intersection of environmental humanities, Latin American cultural studies, and decolonial critique, with an emphasis on extractivism, race, gender, and territorial resistance in the Amazon and beyond.

"Drawing on my background in public environmental advocacy, my work bridges scholarly and public discourse to examine the legacies of colonialism and the cultural forms that challenge them," Carey-Webb said.

While Carey-Webb says collaborative efforts were a key part of the pair's successful research project, Rovello really paved her own research journey demonstrating great independence and initiative. This balance of collaboration and individual exploration underscores the multifaceted nature of research and the diverse pathways that can lead to significant discoveries, including their project.

"Through my undergrad at UNM, I didn't feel as though my core classes fed my abilities and my ambitions as a researcher. So, I jumped on the chance to write an undergraduate thesis," Rovello said.

Therefore, through Rovello's thesis, she explored the politically engaged work of Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles, placing his artistic interventions in dialogue with affect theory and histories of authoritarianism.

"My research was prompted by an honest reaction to the work; I couldn't decide if I loved or hated it, if it disgusted or invigorated me, if the artist's message was completely opaque or if, somehow, I implicitly agreed with him," she said. "These feelings were strong enough that I wanted to write about them. I wanted to know where they came from art historically, and how Meireles constructed a new affective experience."

Rovello graduated in May and was named a 2025-2026 Fulbright scholar. She plans to move to Brazil and work as an English teaching assistant.

"As my research progressed, I could read the news, talk with friends, observe my surroundings, and feel as though my understanding of the world around me also grew and changed. It was incredibly beneficial to have someone in my corner to talk through my doubts and my discoveries. My work with Professor Carey-Webb represents, for me, the kind of academic environment where great ideas happen," Rovello said.