New Mexico Business Weekly's 2010 Who's Who in Technology

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Christopher Ziomek

CEO, ZTEC Instruments

by Christie Chisholm, New Mexico Business Weekly, April 2010

Christopher Ziomek makes instruments that test other instruments. Beyond that brief explanation, the nature of his job and his business become increasing difficult to convey, at least to people who aren’t technologists. ZTEC Instruments, Ziomek’s 14-year-old company, makes things like modular digital oscilloscopes, function generators and arbitrary waveform generators and sells them to entities in aerospace and defense and high-energy physics. The equipment used in such places obviously requires a great degree of precision and accuracy. ZTEC’s job is to make sure that equipment works.

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Tremble, Black Thumbs!

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You're about to get greened

by Christie Chisholm, Weekly Alibi, April 1, 2010

The first living thing I remember trying to grow was a strawberry plant. My mom helped me put it in the soil right outside our front door. My mom had a way with plants. She molded massive berms, teeming with pink geraniums, powder-puff-like marigolds and starry daffodils. In our backyard, she nurtured plum trees and guarded heirloom tomatoes, which ballooned into ripe, deep crimson orbs the size of baseballs.

When I was around the age of 10, she let me pick out a tiny pine tree, smaller than me, and showed me how to maneuver it into the earth. She told me we’d watch it grow, and it amazed me that it would take more than a decade for it to stretch into adulthood. And that one day it would tower over us, and by then I would be an adult, too.

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All the Wild Horses

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The preservation of Spanish mustangs in New Mexico

by Christie Chisholm, Weekly Alibi, January 14, 2010

Carlos LoPopolo is large in stature—and in ambition. His frame seems to dwarf the wooden bench he’s perched on at the Satellite Coffee on University. His height is hard to gauge from a sitting position, but he looms over the table, a studded black cowboy hat bobbing as he talks, which is most of the time. To his right, Paul Polechla serves as his counterpart—a man of average size and quiet disposition, wearing a white cowboy hat and yellow-and-blue checkered shirt, topped with a matching silk bandana tied around his neck. LoPopolo is a Southwest historian and the founder of the New Mexican Horse Project, an organization many New Mexicans know nothing about. Polechla is the group’s biologist as well as a biology professor at UNM.

Though the Horse Project’s mission to preserve a certain kind of horse is simple, LoPopolo and Polechla will tell you the road they’ve been down has been anything but. In the 10 years the organization has existed, LoPopolo has met criticism and fury from horse breeders and cattle ranchers, spent nearly $1 million out of his own pocket, and has even been graced with the occasional death threat. The reason he puts up with it? It’s all to protect a horse most people thought no longer existed.

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Hot Corn

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A report says rising temps will hurt the nation’s moneymaking crops. But can wind save them?

by Christie Chisholm, Weekly Alibi, May 21, 2009

Americans love corn. This year, our nation planted nearly 85 million acres of it, making it our largest agricultural crop. (The second-largest crop is soybeans, with a little more than 76 million acres planted this year.) That’s according to the USDA. It makes sense that we put so much of it in the ground; sometimes it seems like everything we produce in this country comes with a side of corn.

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Pour Me a River

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Albuquerque drinks from the Rio Grande

by Christie Chisholm, Weekly Alibi, December 25, 2008

Two roiling basins of water press against each other, divided by a two-story-high concrete wall. One side is a gurgling brown mess of chemical dust—it looks like mud soup. But the other side glistens, clear as glass, tempting a dip of the hand.

The water is connected. The brown goo looks the way it does due to ferric (iron) chloride, which is mixed with the water to act as a kinetic coagulant, smashing into and grabbing hold of stray non-H20 particles. The water then filters at the bottom of the wall through a “weir” (a dam-like structure used to divert flow) and emerges in the other basin, seemingly pristine. This water will find its way to your glass, but as of now, it’s only completed part of the journey.

Even though neither basin signifies the first or last step in the process that is securing Albuquerque’s water supply, together they serve as a lovely visual metaphor: the sediment and cloudy mass of river water on one side, the purity of drinking water on the other.

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