houck2040/research_news huggingface dataset:
Members of the postdoctoral executive committees organized and coordinated the Symposium. The Division of Research and the postdoctoral offices from the College of Medicine and College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences provided administrative support.
The President’s Excellence Fund at Texas A&M University will present its second annual symposium – and its first virtual symposium – on Monday, September 28, 2020, beginning at 9 a.m. at https://pef-symposium.tamu.edu/.
The virtual symposium will feature eight pre-recorded video presentations from Texas A&M principal investigators whose interdisciplinary research teams received Round Two funding from the X-Grants program, as well as up to 100 poster presentations from faculty teams with funding from the Texas A&M Triads for Transformation (T3) program.
Both the X-Grants and T3 programs are initiatives of the 10-year, $100 million President’s Excellence Fund, launched in 2017.
This year’s virtual symposium will include opening remarks from Texas A&M President Michael K. Young.
“The President’s Excellence Fund has exceeded all of my most optimistic expectations,” President Young said. “I have been personally inspired by the innovative ideas from our faculty and tremendously impressed by the collaboration among both junior and senior faculty and across disciplines.”
The program will also feature a welcome from Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau.
“This initiative is helping us build the culture and habit of collaboration that is essential to solving big problems and preparing for even bigger challenges as they arise,” Barteau said. “It continues to forge new collaborations that engage the full spectrum of talent at Texas A&M University, not just in fields like science, engineering, medicine, and agriculture, but in education, architecture, and psychology. It is critical to bring a diversity of perspectives to the world’s great challenges.”
This annual event has moved to an online platform due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Attendees will have the benefit of viewing any and all presentations at their leisure, along with viewing or listening to presentations as many times as they like.
The faculty members who will make X-Grants presentations are:
The X-Grants program invests $7 million each year, with Round Two funding supporting 72 Texas A&M researchers across eight projects.
Annually, the T3 program provides $3 million in project seed funding for 100 interdisciplinary teams of three Texas A&M faculty members each to encourage the development of long-term research and scholarship collaborations across academic disciplines.
Eleven faculty members at Texas A&M University received Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the foundation’s 2020 cycle of funding, the Division of Research announced today.
The NSF CAREER program offers support to early career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education as well as to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early career faculty are expected to build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
Each year, the NSF presents an estimated 500 CAREER awards, totaling around $250 million in funding, to early career faculty at U.S. institutions of higher learning as well as independent museums, observatories, research labs, professional societies, and similar organizations associated with research or educational activities.
“Congratulations to our exceptional faculty members for earning this outstanding recognition from the National Science Foundation,” Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said. “At Texas A&M, we emphasize leadership in both research and education. With this crucial support from the NSF, these early career faculty members are on their way toward careers that, with the students they will mentor, will advance innovative and effective solutions to the world’s most challenging problems.”
According to Texas A&M colleges and schools, the following faculty members received NSF Early CAREER Awards during the 2020 funding cycle:
The Arts & Humanities Fellows Program in Texas A&M University’s Division of Research today launched an online showcase of animated shorts featuring outstanding scholarship generated by the program’s Class of 2015 fellows.
Each animated short describes a research project supported by a three-year grant of $15,000 from the Arts & Humanities Fellows Program. Recognized for their creativity and scholarly value, these projects were the first to receive funding from the program. The videos are available at https://vpr.tamu.edu/initiate-research/arts-and-humanities-fellows/2015-fellows.
“At Texas A&M, we believe that investing in the arts and humanities is as critical for building a better future as is investing in science and technology,” Vice President of Research Mark A. Barteau said. “By presenting these outstanding research projects through animation, our Arts & Humanities Fellows Program hopes to immerse its audiences in the remarkable creativity and intellectual prowess of our Fellows.”
The videos feature the following Arts & Humanities Fellows and their projects:
In the coming months, videos will be produced on each of the five classes of the Arts & Humanities Fellows Program, as well as future classes.
Eight interdisciplinary research projects will share $7 million in funding from Round 3 of Texas A&M University’s X-Grants program, an initiative of the 10-year, $100 million President’s Excellence Fund.
The Round 3 funded projects represent 80 faculty members and other researchers from eight colleges—agriculture and life sciences, architecture, engineering, geosciences, medicine, pharmacy, science and veterinary medicine; the Texas A&M Health Science Center and the Qatar and Galveston campuses.
“These interdisciplinary projects have the potential for significant advances in areas such as cancer and COVID-19 therapies, natural disaster response and mitigation, novel space management, mental health, migration behaviors, water quality and improvements to the efficiency of current technologies,” said Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau. “It is noteworthy that half the selected project teams are not led by tenured faculty.  This demonstrates the caliber of the researchers that Texas A&M has attracted in recent years, as well as their capacity for innovation and leadership. It bodes well for the future as researchers across the institution work together to develop creative solutions for the benefit of the global community.”
There were 142 one-page proposals submitted to the program, 43 of which were chosen to submit preliminary proposals resulting in 22 selected to submit final proposals. After oral presentations and reviews by three reviewers each, a review panel met and chose eight proposals for funding.
Six teams of Texas A&M University students shared $6,000 in prizes during a data science competition hosted by the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS).
The competition required students to analyze airline data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics to develop measures and models to forecast the expected performance of airlines.
Competitors were given the option of testing models for service metrics such as customer satisfaction regarding flight delays and lost baggage. However, students were encouraged to explore outside these recommendations if it inspired new and innovative analyses of existing data. Each team produced a report of up to 20 pages with appendices for codes and model output.
More than ninety teams  registered for the event and 15 submitted entries. The teams competed in two categories: graduate or undergraduate. In response to the COVID-19 health crisis, the competition moved to an all-online format for working sessions and the final event on April 22, 2020. First-place teams in each category received $1,500, second $1,000 and third $500.
“Competitors in both divisions demonstrated remarkable skills in framing the problem and executing their technical approach,” said Nick Duffield, TAMIDS director and professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, College of Engineering. “The winning teams derived novel insights into airline performance and translated these into recommendations for business operations.”
In the graduate student category, first place went to team PI Star Skyblazers, comprising Sheelabhadra Dey and Sumedh Pendurkar, both in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, College of Engineering. Analytics Necromancers placed second with Akhil Arora, Akhilesh Gandhi, Jianping Li and Manali S. Zantye, all in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering. Third place went to Approximately Normal, with Satwik Acharyya, Indrajit Ghosh, Sandipan Pramanik, Ananya Roy Chowdhury and Rachael Shudde, all in the Department of Statistics, College of Science.
In the undergraduate category, first place was awarded to Inflightful, with Allyson King, Cameron Brill, Nathan Reddy and Samarth Dave, all in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, College of Engineering. Second place went to Cluster One, with Landon Buechner, Department of Mathematics, College of Science. Third place went to Confident Outliers, with Zichen Li, Department of Mathematics, Fang Shu, Department of Statistics, both in the College of Science; Songlin Xie, J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering; and Yuhan Zhang, Department of Economics, College of Liberal Arts.
The panel of judges comprised Duffield; Edward R. Jones, executive professor (retired), Master of Science Analytics Program, Mays Business School;  Venkatesh Shankar, director of research at the Center for Retailing Studies and professor, Mays Business School;  Shawn Turner, senior research engineer, Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI); Shanin Shahrmpour, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering and the Department of Electrical & Computer engineering, College of Engineering; Jianhua Huang, associate director, TAMIDS; and Charles Lindsey, machine learning scientist, Revionics. Additionally, representatives from TAMU Datathon, Josiah Coad and Chinmay Phulse, both undergraduates in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, College of Engineering, organized information and working sessions for competitors.
The event received sponsorship from Revionics, the Department of Statistics, the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering and TTI.
Texas A&M University today announced the selection of 10 faculty members as Arts & Humanities Fellows for 2020. Each fellowship includes a three-year grant of $15,000 to support scholarship in the humanities or creative work in the arts.
Since its launch in 2015, the Arts & Humanities Fellowship Program has sponsored projects by 41 faculty members, including the 10 newest fellows.
The program is designed to recognize the importance of the arts and humanities in shaping and advancing human civilization, Texas A&M Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said.
“For the past five years, our Arts & Humanities Fellowships have encouraged our faculty to generate knowledge in history, literature, political science, philosophy, architecture, interdisciplinary critical studies and other disciplines in the humanities,” Barteau said, “or to pursue excellence in the performing or fine arts. The intellectual vibrancy of these fields is essential, not only to Texas A&M’s research and scholarship, but to our education of society’s leaders. I am excited by the breadth of topics and creative methods represented among the projects of this year’s fellows, and look forward to their fruition.
All Texas A&M faculty who engage in scholarship in the humanities or in creative work in the arts are eligible to apply for the fellowships.
The program received 43 applications for the 2020 fellowships, according to Gerianne Alexander, associate vice president for research and director of the program.  “We are thrilled by the high quality of this year’s applications,” Alexander said, “and encourage all eligible faculty members to develop proposals for the 2021 fellowships.”
Each spring Arts & Humanities fellows are chosen by a peer-review committee from project-based applications. Selections are based on merit and originality, professional qualifications, clarity, benefit to the public and the quality of the overall presentation.
Arts & Humanities Fellowships for 2020 were awarded to the following faculty members:
José Luis Bermúdez, professor, Department of Philosophy & Humanities, College of Liberal Arts, who plans to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of different conceptualizations of selfhood in the ancient, medieval and early modern periods, based on the proceedings of a federally funded workshop and his research into Aristotle’s theory of the soul.
David Donkor, associate professor, Department of Performance Studies, College of Liberal Arts, who will produce a book, Staging Independence, about Ghana’s 1957 independence commemoration and exploring the national, international and transnational importance of Ghana’s maiden independence.
Side Emre, associate professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts, who will apply a combination of visual arts, computer technology, codicology, history, religion, anthropology and mysticism to generate a multi-lingual, interdisciplinary study of unpublished Arabic and Ottoman manuscripts that feature hand-drawn Sufi diagrams of mystical cosmologies.
Carmela Garritano, associate professor, Department of International Studies, College of Liberal Arts, who will complete work on a book that combines energy humanities scholarship with African film and media, demonstrating the crucial role of humanities-based research in addressing fossil-fuel dependence and human-influenced climate warming, which disproportionately affects residents of the global south.
Sonia Hernandez, associate professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts, who will use the example of an attempted lynching of a Mexican migrant in 1900-era Texas to produce a book on how such moments of violence led regional Mexican and Anglo American elites and working-class Mexicans from Texas and northern Mexico to create unlikely cross-border alliances to mitigate violence.
Britt Mize, associate professor, Department of English, College of Liberal Arts, who will generate a public scholarly database and a traditional scholarly book to document the influence of the eighth century epic poem “Beowulf” on the modern world and to analyze its impact on academic and popular culture (scholarly, creative, political, educational and religious) from the 18th century to today.
Stephen Badalyan Riegg, assistant professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts, who will produce a book that explores how and why the Romanov dynasty both encouraged and encumbered European settlement in the Russian empire’s strategically vital periphery between 1800 and 1917 while examining how diverse Westerners benefited or hindered tsarist imperialism.
Hope Hui Rising, assistant professor, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College of Architecture, who will investigate approaches for designing sustainable settlements in places near rivers, lakes and oceans that can proactively adapt to the effects of climate change —such as rising sea levels or intense flooding — while also engaging in mitigation strategies that are more effective and timely.
Andrea Roberts, assistant professor, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College of Architecture, who will generate a book that examines the struggles of more than 500 Texas freedom colonies, exploring issues of land stewardship, ownership and cultural production while documenting the ongoing resistance to social forces that may seek to erase heritage, place and “free” black identity.
Robin Veldman, assistant professor, Religious Studies Program, College of Liberal Arts, who will study a phenomenon she calls ”incivil religion” — religious discourse that embraces incivility as its underlying mode of expression — with a focus on how this discourse portrays the environmental crisis, which may undermine the narrative of progress fundamental to discussions about America’s purpose and destiny.
About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery, including in science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M generated annual expenditures of more than $952 million in fiscal year 2019. Texas A&M ranked in the top 20 of the most recent National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development survey based on expenditures of more than $922 million in fiscal year 2018. Texas A&M’s research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting, in many cases, in economic benefits to the state, nation and world. To learn more, visit Research@Texas A&M.
The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) today announced Karen L. Wooley, University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, as a 2019 NAI Fellow. The NAI will induct Wooley with 167 other fellows in Phoenix on April 10, 2020.
The NAI
Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of
innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a
tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of
society. Election to NAI Fellow is the highest professional distinction
accorded solely to academic inventors.
“We applaud
the NAI for recognizing Professor Wooley’s significant contributions to polymer
science and to applications with commercial and societal benefit,” said Mark A.
Barteau, vice president for research at Texas A&M and an NAI Fellow. “She
is an outstanding scientist and researcher whose remarkable body of work heralds
even greater innovations to come.”
Recent
inventions from Wooley’s laboratory include a sustainable plastic that degrades
in water; a wound dressing that the body absorbs; a non-toxic polymer coating that
can prevent marine animals from sticking to a ship’s hull; and nanoparticles
that can absorb 10 times their weight in spilled crude oil.
Wooley is
the W. T. Doherty-Welch Chair in Chemistry and a University Distinguished
Professor in the Department of Chemistry, College of Science, with joint
appointments in the Department of Chemical Engineering in the College of
Engineering and the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, which is
administered jointly by the colleges of science and engineering.
She also serves
as director of the Laboratory for Synthetic-Biologic Interactions. Her research
interests include the synthesis and characterization of degradable polymers
derived from natural products, unique macromolecular architectures and complex
polymer assemblies, and the design and development of well-defined
nanostructured materials.
After
receiving her doctorate from Cornell in 1993, Wooley joined the faculty of
Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., where she became a full professor with
tenure in 1999 and a James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in
Arts & Sciences in 2006. She relocated to Texas A&M in 2009.
She is a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of
Chemistry, as well as an honorary fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society.
Honors include the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Polymer Chemistry, the
Royal Society of Chemistry Centenary Prize in 2014 and the Oesper Award from
the ACS in 2015.
Upon her
induction, Wooley will become the 11th current or past Texas A&M faculty
member selected as an NAI Fellow since the organization named its charter
fellows in 2012.

To date, NAI Fellows hold more than 41,500
issued U.S. patents, which have generated more than 11,000 licensed
technologies and companies, and created more than 36 million jobs. In addition,
more than $1.6 trillion in revenue has been generated based on NAI Fellow
discoveries.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) will induct three faculty-researchers from Texas A&M University as 2019 AAAS fellows during the association’s annual meeting on Feb. 15 in Seattle, the Division of Research announced today.
In all, AAAS named 443 new fellows
in recognition of their extraordinary achievements in science, the association
said in a news release today. The 2019 AAAS fellows from Texas
A&M are:
“I am pleased that AAAS has
recognized the tremendous scientific contributions of these exceptional members
of the Texas A&M faculty,” Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau
said. “Dr. Yang, Dr. Opperman and Dr. Masad have clearly enhanced and advanced science
on a global scale. They serve as outstanding examples of our university’s
mission to provide innovative and effective solutions to the world’s most
challenging problems.”
The addition of Yang, Opperman
and Masad will bring the current number of AAAS fellows on the Texas A&M
faculty to 58.
Formed in 1848, AAAS is the
world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society, with members in more than
91 nations.
Texas
A&M Technology Commercialization (TTC) recognized three Texas A&M
University faculty members with its 2019 Innovation Awards during its annual Patent
and Innovation Awards Luncheon on Thursday, April 18, at the Walter and Leonore
Annenberg Presidential Conference Center. The Innovation Awards acknowledge those
researchers whose work exemplifies the spirit of innovation within The Texas
A&M University System.
In addition,
TTC presented
49 Patent Awards to 53 faculty members and other researchers from the A&M
System whose inventions received protection from the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office during 2018. This year’s recipients represent Texas A&M, the Texas
A&M Engineering Experiment Station, Texas A&M AgriLife Research,
Prairie View A&M University and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
Vice
President for Research Mark A. Barteau said, “The process of developing and
patenting our innovations is integral to how Texas A&M University
approaches its mission as a land-grant research institution.  First, patents serve the public by providing
a clear path for innovations to move from the laboratory to the marketplace.
Second, they provide important revenue streams for the A&M System and our
researchers. Third, for every dollar we receive from these revenue streams, we
generate $1.40 in research reinvestments.”
TTC presented its 2019 Innovation Awards to:
Dallas-based law firm Winstead served as the event’s underwriting
sponsor. Winstead attorneys are Trusted Advisors® and counsel to major higher
education institutions in Texas and beyond.
Since 2006, Texas A&M has formally incorporated commercialization
into the criteria for granting tenure to its faculty members. TTC works with
faculty and other researchers to secure patents to protect their inventions;
establish productive relationships with business and industry; negotiate
agreements to license innovations for production and distribution; and in some
cases establish start-up companies to manufacture and market their inventions.
Eight faculty members from Texas A&M University are scheduled to make presentations during the inaugural President’s Excellence Fund Symposium on Thursday, April 4, 1:30–4:50 p.m. in the Frymire Auditorium at the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Presidential Conference Center.
Each speaker is a leader or a member of an
interdisciplinary research team that earned project funding from the first
round of Texas
A&M’s X-Grants program, an initiative of the 10-year, $100 million
President’s Excellence Fund.