The College of Arts & Sciences launches Sandia @ UNM speaker series: UNM Newsroom

UNM’s partnerships with National Laboratories are integral to supporting our research, education and service mission. To foster these relationships and increase our research capacity, the College of Arts & Sciences has partnered with Sandia National Laboratories to pilot a new speaker series called “Sandia@UNM.”

As part of the series, Sandia employees will share their research with the campus community to highlight the important work happening at Sandia to the broader UNM community and to help foster partnerships with faculty.

The event is free and will take place on April 25 from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM in the Physics & Astronomy Interdisciplinary Science (PAÍS) Building, Room 1100. All members of the UNM community and beyond are encouraged to attend. The link to register is here.

“The range of basic and applied science taking place at Sandia National Laboratory is truly breathtaking, but often takes place under the RADAR,” said Chris Lippitt, associate dean for research in the College of Arts & Sciences. “I hope these presentations will highlight the incredible work happening there, make it more visible to UNM and the greater Albuquerque community, and lead to new collaborations, innovations and economic opportunities.

Aaron Jones, Ph.D., an alumnus of UNM’s Department of Psychology, will kick off this new series with his presentation, “Using Extended Reality to Study Human Behavior – WAIT – Sandia Does That?”

A common misconception is that Sandia’s work focuses exclusively on the engineering of defense technologies, but their research covers a wide range of application areas and draws expertise from an equally wide range of disciplines.

Jones will present how Extended Reality (XR) can be applied within cognitive science. The presentation will explore how “XR tools can help improve training and create a testbed for research scientists to study human performance under more realistic conditions.”

His presentation will also include his involvement in the work with Sandia and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the impact of this XR work and where it may go in the future. Finally, Jones will discuss a new lab he is involved with at Sandia, the Virtual Intelligence Performance Engineering Research (VIPER) lab.

Jones is a senior member of the technical staff in applied cognitive sciences at Sandia National Laboratories and a UNM alumnus, having received his Ph.D. in 2021 he will study with Professor Vince Clark.