Meet the SACJ Faculty

Dr. Jacob Avery is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at New Mexico Highlands University. After earning his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Pennsylvania, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Before coming to NMHU, he served on the faculty at UC Irvine. Dr. Avery is an award-winning teacher and mentor, whose pedagogy focuses on designing and delivering relevant courses for students while simultaneously encouraging them to understand themselves and their worlds with heightened sociological sophistication. He sees himself as a teacher, mentor, and coach, who is deeply committed to helping students achieve their scholastic and life goals. Dr. Avery’s research examines urban and rural poverty in the United States. A key feature of his scholarly agenda is putting a humanistic face on people and populations subjugated by socioeconomic marginalization, political violence, and extreme forms of social suffering. Dr. Avery serves on the Faculty Research Committee (FRC) as well as the President’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council at NMHU.

Dr. Avery is the interim graduate coordinator of the Public Affairs – Applied Sociology master’s degree program.

Dr. Erika Derkas has been a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at New Mexico Highlands University since 2003. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of New Mexico, at which time she was a visiting scholar at Loyola Marymount University, Las Angeles. Dr. Derkas is a passionate academic and activist who centers her work on reproductive justice, art activism and social justice issues. Specifically, Dr. Derkas’ research explores state and private sponsored population control and regulation of BIPOC communities, nationally and internationally.  She also investigates the use of art to challenge and resist occupation and oppression for female and gender expansive artists.  She is the co-founder and co-director of the Social Justice Program in Sociology and co-founder of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program.

Dr. Gadsden has earned her A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. in sociology as well as a graduate certificate in women’s studies. Her areas of specialization include criminology; criminal justice; deviance, gender & sexuality; race & ethnicity; popular culture & mass media; and qualitative methodology.

She has been teaching at New Mexico Highlands University at the undergraduate and graduate levels since 2012. She teaches several different courses, including Dispute Resolution, Criminology, Domestic and Sexual Violence, Drugs in American Society, Global Crime, Institutional Corrections, Law Enforcement, Race and Ethnic Relations, Social Deviance, Social Stratification, Sociology of Law, Social Theory, Sociology of Murder, Sociology of Sexuality and Violence & Society.

Dr. Gadsden is the coordinator of the Criminal Justice Studies major and the master’s degree in Criminology.

Assistant Professor: Anthropology

Office Location: Lora Shields, Room 261

Office Phone: (505)-454-3546

Laura Pinto Hansen earned her B.S., M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at University of California Riverside (UCR), after a career in the finance sector, in financial and tax planning. Dr. Hansen is a Professor Emerita in Criminal Justice at Western New England University in Springfield, Massachusetts and is currently teaching as a part-time instructor in criminal justice at NMHU Las Vegas (beginning Fall 2022). Dr. Hansen is a U.S. and Portugal national, with dual citizenship.

Dr. Hansen’s scholarship and research focuses have been in criminology, studying cybercrime, financial crime, youth gangs, and young juvenile offenders. She has published a number of peer reviewed articles, chapters in books, and is the author of White Collar Crime and Corporate Crime: A Case Study Approach (2020). She is currently under contract to publish Introduction to Penology and Corrections (2022) and Juvenile Delinquency (2023), both with Aspen Publishing. Her previous work in social causes included the prevention of youth violence and gang recruitment in Springfield and Holyoke, Massachusetts, volunteering as a grant writer and program evaluator.

The second edition of White Collar and Corporate Crime, Aspen Publishing will be published in early 2025 (currently in production). A new book, Cybercrime, Cognella Publishing, is my most recent project, expected to be published in late summer 2025. 

(She/her/ella)

Dr. Munro is an anthropological-archaeologist who earned a dual B.A. degree in Anthropology and Religious Studies from Florida State University. She also holds a M.S. in Geography (Geographic Information Sciences) from FSU. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Louisiana State University in 2018, where her dissertation research focuses on early religious developments, religious syncretism and sacred landscapes in the highlands of central Peru. Kimberly has been the co-director of the Cosma Archaeological Project since 2013, a long-term research project involving excavation paired with ethnographic work in the upper Nepeña River Valley, located in the Department of Ancash.

More broadly, Kimberly’s anthropological interests lie in an anthropology of pilgrimage, shamanism, and religious syncretism and the creation and re-imagining of space, place and sacred landscapes. Her current work is still focused on studying the occupation and use-history of the Cosma Complex, as well as an anthropology of pilgrimage, shamanism, and religious syncretism in the form of blended, and subversive landscapes.

Dr. Munro also previously spent several years in Cultural Resource Management, working for the US Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management conducting archaeological field work and site assessments.

She started at New Mexico Highlands in the Fall of 2023 and teaches Cultural Resource Management, Ethnographic/Qualitative Methods, Introduction to Southwest Archaeology, Archaeological Method and Theory, People & Plants in Prehistory, Physical Anthropology, Applied Anthropology, and Native American Beliefs and Practices.

Emeritus Faculty: Sociology