Charlotte Gard knows mentorship can play a critical role early in a professor’s career – and that’s why she’s determined to support junior faculty members in her role as the Stan Fulton Chair in Business.
Gard, a biostatistician and associate professor in NMSU’s Department of Economics, Applied Statistics, and International Business, is the latest faculty member to hold the endowed chair named after Stan Fulton – one of NMSU’s most generous donors. NMSU established the chair in 2006 to enhance the university’s leadership, reputation, academic programs, outreach, and research across the fields and disciplines represented in the College of Business.
“Part of this endowed chair involves serving as a mentor and role model for junior faculty members, and that aspect greatly appealed to me,” said Gard, who has been the chairholder since 2021.
Gard will serve as the Stan Fulton chair through 2025 and has since implemented several initiatives to support and promote research efforts among junior faculty members. One of those initiatives involves awarding grants to fund small-scale projects. In February 2024, Gard expects to launch a new research colloquium series featuring recipients of Stan Fulton awards.
“I’ve had a fair amount of experience with funded research,” said Gard, who joined the College of Business in 2012. “I’m trying to bring that experience to the college. Through this chair, I’m hoping I can do other things to support research among faculty in the college, particularly among junior faculty.”
Over her time at NMSU, Gard has collaborated on several research projects with investigators from NMSU’s Department of Public Health Sciences. Those projects have examined peripartum depression in Doña Ana County, depression among students during the COVID-19 pandemic, and cesarean birth rates among Hispanic women along the United States-Mexico border region, among other areas.
Gard, who earned a Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Washington, was the NMSU lead on a pilot project supported by NMSU’s Partnership for the Advancement of Cancer Research. In this project, she worked with investigators from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center to examine the extent to which breast cancer risk estimates are impacted by racial and ethnic differences in the utilization of screening mammography and biopsy. She also spent several years updating and revising the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium Risk Calculator – an interactive tool designed by the consortium’s scientists to estimate a woman’s five - and ten - year risk of developing invasive breast cancer.
One of Gard’s other goals as the Stan Fulton chair is to establish a writing group for faculty in the College of Business. The goal is to create a space for faculty to write and receive feedback in a supportive and comfortable atmosphere. She also is working to create resources to help other researchers with their grant proposals.
“These are some of the ideas I had in mind when I applied for the chair,” she said.
Outside her responsibilities as the Stan Fulton chair, Gard teaches several statistics classes, mentors students in the Master of Science in Applied Statistics and Master of Data Analytics programs, and serves as the NMSU biostatistician for the Mountain West Clinical and Translational Research Infrastructure Network. She also is a consultant for the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium.