Psychology Dept. Facility & Resources

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Laboratories

At present, there are 29 laboratories in Logan Hall. Individual faculty are assigned laboratory spaces of approximately 200-400 sq. ft. Logan Hall also houses common research laboratories for research with human participants in the Psychology Clinical Neuroscience Center (PCNC), a Category I Center. PCNC laboratories available for use by all Psychology faculty include two interview rooms (50 sq. ft.), an electroencephalography (EEG) suite (200 sq. ft.), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) laboratory (100 sq. ft.), and a sleep laboratory (250 sq. ft.). Logan Hall also houses an animal research facility (ARF) and vivarium, which includes two common laboratory spaces for histology (100-300 sq. ft.) and an animal surgery core facility (300 sq. ft.).

Animal

The Logan Hall ARF contains seven separate housing and testing rooms for rats and mice (approximately 200-300 sq. ft. each), a quarantine room, and equipment for cleaning cages. This facility was renovated in 2011-2012. All housing rooms have separate systems for control of lighting schedule and humidity.

Computers

Logan Hall and Psychology Clinical Neurosciences Center (PCNC)

Logan Hall houses a computer laboratory with 15 desktop computers available to faculty and graduate students. It also has a shared file server (called Helmholtz); an enterprise NetApp storage system owned by the PCNC and hosted at the UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC). The system's total usable capacity is 114.4 TB; 57.2 TB of that is data usable space and lives inside Helmholtz. The other 57.2 TB is for backups and lives on the CARC Chama storage system. Helmholtz utilizes the NetApp Snapshot and SnapMirrors features for data availability, integrity and backups. Snapshots can be used to recover specific files or entire directories after deletion or roll them back to a previous version. Snapshots are critical in recovering from ransomware and malware attacks. The current Snapshot schedule is: 5 hourly, 2 daily, 2 weekly, and 5 monthly. CARC's firewall blocks all incoming traffic towards Helmholtz except for traffic originating from the PCNC and the Department of Psychology wired network. The system can also export data to PCNC/Psychology researchers anywhere in the world over UNM's VPN. All Helmholtz user and group data are encrypted at the volume level and combined with data sealing; this allows for end-to-end encrypted traffic tunnels.

PHI data can also be stored at the Collaborative Informatics and Neuroimaging Suite (COINS) provided by MRN (https://coins.trendscenter.org/). The PCNC has access to additional computing and data storage resources through CARC. The Research Storage Consortium (RSC) in CARC is approximately 1 PB of storage shared between multiple research groups. The PCNC owns 35 TB on RSC for 10 years (until 2023; contract will be re-negotiated), plus 10 TB of additional temporary storage space as needed. RSC will be backed up using a new system currently being installed at CARC. Direct access to RSC is granted for special projects upon request. CARC has significant resources for computation, including thousands of CPUs spread across various platforms for use in these studies.

Center on Alcohol, Substance Use and Addictions (CASAA)

CASAA has a 1 gigabit (GB) Ethernet network with a fiber optic backbone and is running on Novell NetWare servers with RAID Level 5 and 20 terabytes of total storage space. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel is available for off-site users with high-speed Internet access. UNM provides CASAA's Internet connection through a fiber optic connection capable of 1000Mbps. A Sonicwall enterprise level firewall is being used to help prevent Internet-based problems such as Denial of Service attacks and unauthorized access. The firewall also helps to block users from accessing inappropriate websites and material from within CASAA. Antivirus software is installed on all machines that connect to the network to provide comprehensive virus protection for the workstations and servers. CASAA's network is scalable and can easily support future organizational growth but it tends to remain in a state of equilibrium. 

CASAA has a long-standing history of high-quality research in the area of substance use and addictions. CASAA has relationships with several community-based treatment programs that are available as sites for specific clinical trials. CASAA has partnered with community treatment programs to conduct rigorous clinical trials of substance use treatments in real-world clinical settings. The relationships between CASAA and these treatment facilities are ongoing and reciprocal, and CASAA is widely regarded as a critical resource for developing and testing empirically supported treatments for alcohol and other substance use disorders. These programs treat approximately 7000 patients per year. Also, CASAA has uniquely strong relationships with several pueblos, with current clinical research being conducted on one New Mexico pueblo. CASAA also has ongoing relationships with the State of New Mexico Corrections Department, Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center, and the Bernalillo County Juvenile Detention Center. Lastly, the wealth of experience from such research by the CASAA faculty provides an outstanding environment for the research development of early career investigators.

MIND Research Network (MRN)

MRN houses three large computer laboratories that are dedicated to data acquisition and analysis for spectroscopy, functional MRI (fMRI), molecular MRI (mMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), EEG, MEG, and genetics. MRN's computing infrastructure consists of approximately 400 computers and more than 250 TB of network-attached storage that consolidates all research data to facilitate easy access and retrieval. The data center houses several large, shared memory systems (48 and 24 cores with up to 160 GB RAM) and Linux compute clusters and grid computing capability. Additionally, over 30 image-analysis and neuroinformatics applications are installed and administered uniformly across all workstations. Data center power is filtered and backed by a 3 phase APC Symmetra PX 60 kW n+1 Uninterruptible Power Supply (expandable to 80 kW n+1). A diesel generator protects data center air conditioning and power for emergency power, and all power and cooling systems are monitored by IT staff 24/7. All desktop workstations communicate with MRN's data center and network-attached storage via dual, redundant fiber links. MRN is connected to the Internet (and Internet2) via a gigabit fiber link on UNM's campus connecting to various regional networks at 10Gbps. A privately managed backup Internet connection provides business continuity in the event of an extended outage. A Virtual Private Network allows researchers and collaborators to access MRN computing resources remotely through a secure encrypted link. Data acquisition computers across all modalities (1.5T Mobile, 3T, MEG, EEG) have standardized stimulus delivery systems (e.g., pupillometry, audio, video and time coding).

Clinic

The Psychology Clinic is housed in a converted residence (~800 sq. ft.) approximately a 10-minute walk from Logan Hall. The clinic includes waiting room, two large therapy/assessment rooms, two small therapy rooms, an observation room, a telecommunications room/library, kitchenette, restroom, and two professional offices. There is also a graduate student space with a workstation, photocopier, file storage, and student mailboxes. Within this general clinic are four specialty clinics: Alcohol Treatment Clinic, Anxiety Disorders Clinic, Cultural Counseling Center (Diversity Clinic), and Youth Clinic.

Other

CASAA operates two unique services that assure the highest quality psychosocial research data that are available to support research projects:

Program Evaluation Services (PES) maintains a cadre of research interviewers who are highly trained in outreach to recruit clinical participants from community treatment programs, jails, and correctional facilities, and to reliably conduct standardized interviews and code them with a high level of accuracy. Ongoing quality assurance procedures maintain the integrity of the data. PES provides a well-established infrastructure of research services that are designed to: 1) enhance the ease and quality of research for principal investigators, and 2) assure funding agencies that high standards of quality and performance are maintained in CASAA-affiliated research projects. PES support services include:

  • The recruitment of clinical populations, such as: alcohol, substance use, substance use disorders, opiate dependent adolescents, participants with HIV and substance use, participants from jails and prisons (word of mouth), pregnant alcohol dependent participants, Spanish-speaking only alcohol dependent participants, Native American alcohol dependent participants, and dually diagnosed participants
  • Bilingual recruitment and translation services for recruitment materials
  • Recruitment, baseline, and follow-up assessment at CASAA or off-site
  • Follow-up tracking and scheduling
  • Preparation of study protocol case files
  • Confidential case file management and coordination with data entry
  • Collateral and biomedical verification of self-report
  • Quality control of assessment protocols
  • Test-retest reliability monitoring
  • Expert coding of audio and videotapes for quality assurance of interventions
  • Training and monitoring of project staff in assessment procedures
  • PES training and supervision of students, graduate students, or staff hired by PIs for grant-specific
    work
  • Training, certification, and recertification on specific instruments (ASI, SCID, CIDI, TLFB, Form-90,
    etc.)

Research Data Services (RDS) is a centralized service to create databases and data entry systems, enter data, assure the accuracy of entered data through double data entry and other validity checks of the data, and create and archive complete datasets. PES has a long history of working collaboratively with RDS, allowing for the seamless coordination of data collection and data entry.