Former NMBA President Ken Clayton Serving as Vice-Chair of ABA Government Relations Committee
Ken Clayton, CEO and President of Western Bank Artesia and former NMBA President, is serving as vice-chair of the ABA Government Relations Committee and will serve as the committee chair in 2024.
Elizabeth Earls, New Mexico Bank and Trust, represents New Mexico as a member of the ABA Emerging Leaders Council.
New Mexico State Senator and Friend to NMBA Stuart Ingle Retires
Senator Stuart Ingle, who was New Mexico’s senior state senator, resigned his seat effective immediately on October 24, 2023. Ingle represented Chaves, Curry, De Baca, Lea and Roosevelt counties in District 27 and has served as a state senator since 1985.
Ingle said he is resigning to spend more time with his family and that it is time for him to move on with the rest of his life. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be elected for 10 terms, and that’s probably enough,” Ingle said.
Ingle has spent much of his time in the Senate in leadership positions, serving as minority leader, whip and caucus chairman in his nearly 40 years in the Legislature. “I hope I represented the people in my district well, and that’s all my job was about. Anything I did, I hopefully was very helpful to my Senate district and the schools in my district,” Ingle said.
Both Republican and Democrat Senate colleagues said Ingle has been a mentor with a wealth of institutional knowledge. “Stuart was probably the last of the great statesmen in the New Mexico Legislature,” said William Payne, a retired senator who served as minority whip while Ingle was minority leader.
Ingle took Senator Pete Campos, D-Las Vegas, under his wing when Campos was a freshman senator almost 32 years ago. Ingle taught him about budgeting, policy setting and building consensus among people with different points of view, Campos said. “Senator Ingle has been a very fair, pragmatic and visionary senator throughout his career,” Campos said. “He has worked efficiently and effectively. He’s worked in a very pragmatic, reasonable and fair way across the aisle, and most importantly, with legislators from both houses and every governor that has come to serve the state of New Mexico.”
While Ingle was effective at moving stalled legislation forward and cutting through the complexity of a myriad of issues, Campos said he may be remembered most for communicating every step of the way with both sides of the aisle.
Senator Mark Moores, the current Senate Minority’s caucus chair, summed Ingle up well. “You could never pull the wool over Stuart’s eyes,” said Moores.
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has appointed Greg Nibert from Roswell to replace Ingle. Nibert has previously served in the New Mexico House of Representatives.
UNM Names Next Dean of Anderson School of Management
The University of New Mexico has named a top business school leader from Bentley University as the next dean of the Anderson School of Management. Alina Chircu will take over her new position on April 8. She currently works as a professor in the Computer Information Systems Department at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. During her time at the institution, she also served as interim dean of business.
She, at one point, managed all aspects of the business school, which has more than 150 full-time faculty members in nine academic departments. She was a member of the university president’s cabinet and was involved in high-level decisions and strategy sessions in that role. As an associate dean at Bentley, Chircu stabilized an enrollment decline and increased revenue by 12%, according to a UNM news release.
Chircu’s teaching and research interests include business process and value chain management, design thinking, digital transformation and other topics. She has a Ph.D. in business administration from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer systems modeling and simulation from the University of Bucharest in Romania.
“The Anderson School of Management and its exceptional staff and students have a long history of working collaboratively with alumni and the larger business community in New Mexico,” she said. “I look forward to continuing and amplifying these efforts and helping Anderson play a lead role in education, entrepreneurship and economic development not only in New Mexico by also regionally and nationally.”
