houck2040/research_news huggingface dataset:
Olga Dror, associate professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts, is the author of the 2007 book “Cult, Culture, and Authority: Princess Lieu Hanh in Vietnamese History,” and the editor and translator of two volumes on Vietnamese and Chinese religions. Her most recent work focused on the experience of Vietnamese civilians caught in the Battle of Huế during the 1968 Tet Offensive. For her Arts & Humanities Fellowship project, Dror plans to complete a book titled “Raising Vietnamese: Youth Identities in North and South Vietnam During the War (1965-1975),” a comparative analysis of how Vietnamese on both sides of the conflict shaped the identities of their youth.
Peter Lieuwen, a professor of performance studies and composer-in-residence in the College of Liberal Arts, creates symphonic and chamber music the New York Times has hailed as “an attractive array of shimmering, shuddering sonorities.” His work has been commissioned, performed and recorded by orchestras, small ensembles and artists throughout North America and Europe. For his Arts & Humanities Fellowship project, Lieuwen will compose, perform and record two new orchestral works: “Concerto for Chamber Ensemble and Orchestra” and “Chamber Concerto.” The project will involve interaction and collaboration with professional musicians from Austria, Brazil, Germany, Slovakia and the United States.
Galen D. Newman, assistant professor of landscape architecture and urban planning in the College of Architecture, conducts research into human settlement, urban decline/regeneration, urban design and advanced digital representation. Much of his work focuses on theories, formation, measurements and regeneration of vacant land and abandoned structures. His Arts & Humanities Fellowship project, “Smart Shrinkage: Design for the Un-developing Landscape,” will address a problem facing hundreds of urban areas: how to manage declines in urban populations. The project will explore the unique urban design and landscape characteristics of heavily depopulated urban neighborhoods; use the Land Transformation Model, a GIS-based land-use prediction tool, to predict future vacancy; and develop an urban design strategy in response to those conditions.
Kristan A. Poirot, assistant professor of communications and Women’s Gender Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts, studies the rhetoric from and about social movements rooted in race and gender. Her 2014 book, “A Question of Sex,” stands at the intersection of feminist rhetorical history and contemporary feminist theory and demonstrates that contemporary theories about sex, gender, identity and difference compel a rethinking of how we understand feminist movements and their public discourse and protests. Her Arts & Humanities Fellowship project, “Gendered Landscapes of Memory: Rhetoric, Place, and Black Freedom,” will build on work in tourism studies, cultural geography, rhetoric, history and gender studies with the goal of better understanding the concepts that inform the public’s collective memory as “gendered landscapes.”
Brian Rouleau, assistant professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts, concentrates on the nineteenth century history of the United States. His 2014 book, “With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire,” examines encounters between US sailors and people overseas during the nineteenth century. For his Arts & Humanities Fellowship, Rouleau will conduct research for a book tentatively titled “Empire’s Children: Youth Culture and the Long Nineteenth Century’s Expansionist Impulse,” which will investigate the ways in which children became central to imperialism in North America, Africa and Australia. The Oxford University Press has expressed interest in the project.
Daniel L. Schwartz, assistant professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts, specializes in late Roman history, with a focus on culture, religion and education. His forthcoming projects include an edited volume on conversion to Christianity and Islam during Late Antiquity and an article on religious violence in fifth and sixth century Roman Syria. Of particular interest to him is Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic that flourished among Middle Eastern Christians, but which is generally neglected by today’s ancient and medieval scholars. For his Arts & Humanities Fellowship, Schwartz will develop a digital publication called SPEAR: Syriac Persons, Events and Relations, to advance the study of Syriac.
During a Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (TIAS) Eminent Scholars Lecture on May 4, an internationally acclaimed pioneer in supramolecular chemistry – Distinguished Professor Peter J. Stang of the University of Utah – will explain how natural but spontaneous events at the molecular level support all life on our planet
TIAS presents one Eminent Scholar lecture each semester. Stang’s lecture, which is titled “Having Fun with Molecules,” begins at 7 p.m. in the Forum of the Rudder Theater Complex, 401 Joe Routt Blvd., on Texas A&M University’s main campus in College Station. Admission is free and open to the public, and parking is available in the nearby University Center Garage. A reception will immediately follow the lecture.
At every moment, nature is skillfully rearranging its version of LEGO building blocks to generate the countless biological processes that sustain life on Earth. In his presentation, Stang will explain “molecular self-assembly,” the spontaneous organization of separate components into the well-defined biological structures that support all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Stang is renowned for significantly advancing organic chemistry over the last five decades. He and his team act as molecular architects who rearrange the building blocks of chemistry to create new and better products to serve advanced medicine, information storage and energy. In recognition of his achievements, Stang received the National Medal of Science in 2011, followed by the American Chemical Society’s 2013 Priestley Medal.
As a TIAS Faculty Fellow who joined the Institute with the class of 2013-14, Stang is collaborating on cutting-edge projects with faculty-researchers and graduate students in the College of Science’s Department of Chemistry.
For more information about the TIAS Eminent Scholar Lecture, contact Lisa Jordan at l-jordan@tamu.edu or (979) 458-4989.
Image: Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University has honored five faculty members with the title of University Distinguished Professor. The five joins only 75 other A&M faculty who hold the title.
The designation goes to faculty members who are pre-eminent in their fields, have made at least one important contribution to their disciplines, and whose research is central and has changed the direction of scholarship in the field.
The 2015 recipients are:
* Dr. Jean-Louis Briaud, professor and holder of the Buchanan Chair, Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, Dwight Look College of Engineering
* Dr. Martin B. Dickman, Christine Richardson Professor of Agriculture, professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, and director of the Institute for Plant Genomics and Biotechnology, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
* Dr. Catherine C. Eckel, Sara and John Lindsey Professor in Liberal Arts and professor in the Department of Economics, College of Liberal Arts
* Dr. Edgar Sánchez-Sinencio, professor and holder of the TI Jack Kilby Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dwight Look College of Engineering
* Dr. David W. Threadgill, professor of veterinary pathobiology and director of the Texas A&M Institute for Genome Sciences and Society, College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and professor and holder of the Tom and Jean McMullin Chair of Genetics in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Medicine, Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine.
Texas A&M University psychology professor and behavioral neuroscientist Steve Maren has been awarded a competitive renewal grant of $1.8 million by the National Institute of Mental Health to be allocated over a duration of another five years. Competitive renewal grants are reviewed every five years to decide if a project should develop further.
The grant is being used in the continuance of the ongoing 12-year research for behavioral techniques involved in the suppression of fear and anxiety. Maren’s project with this new grant, titled “Neural Substrates of Contextual Memory in Fear Extinction,” more specifically focuses on the relapse phase that can occur after issuing behavioral therapy.
“My project is interested in what brain systems, circuits, and connections are involved in telling you that everything is okay,” Maren said. “Because that’s instrumental to suppressing fear and moving beyond the trauma.”
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has named Dr. J.N. Reddy, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, among its 2015 class of new members. Reddy, who is a Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor and holder of the Oscar S. Wyatt Endowed Chair, was recognized year for his contributions to composite structures and engineering education.
Reddy came to Texas A&M as an endowed chaired professor in 1992, bringing his passion for education and research to enrich the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is the author of nearly 500 journal papers and 18 books (several with second and third editions) on energy principles, variational methods, plates and shells, composite materials, mechanics of solids, and the finite element method and its applications. He has delivered more than 120 plenary, keynote or general invited lectures at international conferences and institutions, taught over 90 short courses, and advised 32 postdoctoral fellows and research visitors and over 100 graduate theses.
Reddy’s research centers on theoretical formulations and numerical simulations of problems in solid and structural mechanics, composite materials, computational fluid dynamics, numerical heat transfer, geology and geophysics, and computational biology. Reddy’s most significant contribution is the development of refined third-order and layer-wise plate and shell theories that bear his name in the literature. His plate and shell theories, which account for transverse shear deformation and interlaminar stresses in laminated composite materials are well-received by the composite materials and structures community all over the world and they are highly cited. The Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, DERA, Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom contracted ABAQUS (HKS, Inc.) and Reddy as a consultant to incorporate his ideas on higher-order and layer-wise theories into the software, which is used by universities as well as most structural analysis companies around the world. Reddy was the principal architect of a 3-D fluid flow finite element program based on the penalty function method in NISA finite element software, which is one of the most comprehensive engineering analysis suites available to address the automotive, aerospace, energy and power, civil, and electronics industries. His work on non-Newtonian flows was the basis of the code HyperForm (Reddy’s Ph.D. student was hired by Altair, which owns the software).
More at the Dwight Look College of Engineering
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Times Higher Education (THE) ranks Texas A&M University at Qatar as first among the top five higher education institutions in the Middle East and North Africa, based on the quality of its research.
The magazine has so far only released the top five institutions, and is expected to reveal the full ranking of 30 universities at its MENA Universities Summit Feb. 23-24.
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Image: iStock.com / Rellas
The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) announced this week that two researchers from Texas A&M University, Darwin J. Prockop and B. Don Russell, Jr., will become NAI Fellows this spring.
Prockop and Russell are among 170 new Fellows to be inducted during the NAI’s 4th Annual Conference on March 20 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. NAI Fellows are academic inventors and innovators who are named on U.S. patents and were nominated by their peers for outstanding contributions to innovation.
Texas A&M Vice President for Research Glen A. Laine said, “I am pleased and excited that these outstanding faculty members have been recognized for their applied research, which contributes to our mission as a land grant institution.”
Prockop is the Stearman Chair in Genomic Medicine and a professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine. He directs the Texas A&M College of Medicine’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Scott & White Hospital in Temple, Texas.  Prockop holds 20 U.S. patents and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Medicine.
Russell is the Harry E. Bovay, Jr. Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M, as well as a Regents Professor and a Distinguished Professor. He holds 13 U.S. patents and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.  Russell is a Fellow of five other societies, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the National Society of Professional Engineers, the National Academy of Forensic Engineers, and the British Institution of Engineering and Technology.
Following the induction ceremony in March, the total number of NAI Fellows will come to 414, representing more than 150 prestigious
research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutions. NAI Fellows include 61 presidents and senior leadership of research universities and non-profit research institutes, 208 members of the other National Academies, 21 inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, 16 recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation, 10 recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Science, 21 Nobel Laureates, 11 Lemelson-MIT prize recipients, 112 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows, and 62 IEEE Fellows, among other awards and distinctions.
The 2014 NAI Fellows Selection Committee comprises 17 members, including NAI Fellows, recipients of U.S. National Medals, National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees, members of the National Academies and senior officials from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Association of American Universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association of University Technology Managers, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
The Texas A&M University Chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, has issued a call for nominations for the 2015 Outstanding Distinguished Scientist and the 2015 Outstanding Science Communicator awards.
Nominations are due Feb. 13, 2015. Nominations should include a nomination letter, curriculum vitae, and letters of support.
Recipients will receive a plaque and a $750 cash prize at the Sigma Xi Induction and Awards Banquet in April 2015. The recipient of the Distinguished Scientist Award will present the 2015 Distinguished Scientist Lecture, hosted by Sigma Xi.
For a nominee to be competitive, they should have credentials equivalent to those of previous recipients. See http://http://sigmaxi.tamu.edu/awards for information on the awards and previous winners.
Nominations may be submitted via email, campus mail, or U.S. mail to:
Sigma Xi Coordinator
Division of Research
1260 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843-1260
Email: sigmaxi@tamu.edu
Please note that membership in Sigma Xi is not required for nominators or nominees.
Sigma Xi is an international, chapter-based organization dedicated to nurturing the research enterprise in all fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Unique among scientific honor societies, Sigma Xi has a broad outlook that scans the spectrum of science and technology and is committed to the core values that unite across disciplinary boundaries. For more information about Sigma Xi, visit http://sigmaxi.tamu.edu/.
Nicholas B. Suntzeff, university distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University, has been named a co-recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his role in the 1998 discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe.
The prestigious award, considered the world’s most lucrative academic prize at $3 million, recognizes major insights into the deepest questions of the universe. Suntzeff shared in the international honor along with 50 other scientists who are members of the two teams that simultaneously discovered the mysterious substance known as dark energy and, consequently, unexpected proof of the universe’s accelerating expansion.
Suntzeff co-founded one of those teams, the High-Z Supernova Search Team, along with Brian P. Schmidt, an astronomer at Australian National University. Schmidt was recognized at last night’s star-studded awards ceremony in California along with High-Z teammate and Johns Hopkins University astronomer Adam G. Riess and University of California, Berkeley astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter. Riess, who served as lead author on the High-Z team’s 1998 Astronomical Journal paper announcing the group’s ultimate discovery, was a graduate student finishing his Harvard University thesis at the time, while Perlmutter headed up the competing team, the Supernova Cosmology Project.
The two teams were cited “for the most unexpected discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing as had been long assumed.”
“This is very happy news for the HZT,” Suntzeff told his teammates in a congratulatory email last night. “With this award, everyone by name has been recognized as individuals in our discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe. For me, this is so important because our discovery was possible because we were a team of equals that worked so well together. I am very proud of this award, but I am even more proud of our collaboration, which will always be the scientific achievement of a lifetime for me.”
Closing the “innovation gap” was targeted a year ago as a high national priority by a group of prominent universities, including Texas A&M University, along with several scientific and business organizations, but concern by top representatives of those entities is being expressed on the first anniversary of the initiative that the White House and Congress need to be more supportive and assertive.
Commemorating the first anniversary of the initiative — formally known as “Close the Innovation Deficit”–the supporting organizations renewed their call for increased federal investments in research to build a strong long-term economy, improve medical treatments, and strengthen national security.  As Congress prepares to break for its August recess, leaving key FY15 funding decisions to be addressed in September, leaders from those organizations today conducted a coordinated nationwide effort to communicate the need to close the innovation deficit.
The innovation deficit is the widening gap between actual and needed federal investments in research and higher education at a time when other nations such as China, India and Singapore are dramatically boosting research funding to develop the next great technological and medical breakthroughs to power their economies forward.
The effort to enhance the nation’s innovation initiative is being led by, among others, the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and The Science Coalition, with Texas A&M holding membership in all of them and having pledged support for it at the presidential level.
“Speaking on behalf of Texas A&M and its associated research and service agencies, we are totally committed to helping the nation significantly step up its efforts to be more innovative and research oriented on all fronts—technologically, agriculturally, medically and in defense-related measures, among others,” emphasized Texas A&M Interim President Mark Hussey.
He pointed out that Texas A&M, aided by its associated agencies, is a national leader in research, with many such endeavors having significant potential for development of new technologies and procedures with practical applications that can have marketplace impacts in the near future.
Texas A&M’s annual investment in research stands at a record $820 million, with hundreds of different fields represented.
In providing focus for a large portion of Texas A&M research going forward, the institution’s leaders formulated a “Grand Challenges” initiative that identifies six key areas in which the university has broad-based expertise and for which significant potential exists for positively impact areas related to innovation.  They are Enhancing Human, Animal and Plant Health, Educating 21th Century Leaders, Strengthening Democracy, Providing Sustainable and Efficient Energy, Designing and Protecting the Environment and Improving Economic Development.
The national closing- the- innovation- gap campaign began one year ago today with an open letter to the President and Congress signed by more than 200 university presidents and chancellors, that described the innovation deficit and called on leaders to close it with investments in research and higher education.
Organizations leading the “Close the Innovation Deficit” effort said their members would be speaking to members of Congress in their districts and on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks.  They will urge lawmakers to place a high priority on investments in research in the FY15 appropriations process and, over the longer term, eliminate sequestration and deal with entitlements and tax reform to make possible the increased investments needed to close the innovation deficit.
Earlier this month, Texas A&M’s vice president for research, Dr. Glen Laine, spoke at a roundtable discussion at the National Press Club sponsored by AAU and The Science Coalition, regarding the ongoing effort to close the innovation gap.
He said that although nations such as China may threaten to surpass the United States’ annual investment in research and development, they are unlikely to surpass America’s return on that investment.
Joined by representatives from several other top research institutions in the media briefing titled “All Things Research 2014,” Laine had the opportunity to interact with key writers and their radio and television counterparts and spotlight some of the innovative and cutting-edge research being conducted at the top universities around the nation.
Nations such as China tend to manage their scientific research from the top down, Laine said, with government hierarchy attempting to select research programs and to match them with selected scientists.
“Certainly here, if you take a faculty member and try to apply a top-down approach to research, it’s been historically unsuccessful,” Laine noted. “So even though they are investing the money, our system has a greater return on investment than they will have.”
Laine agreed with several fellow panelists who pointed out that federal investment in basic research is crucial to sustaining innovation and economic development. “Basic research provides the building blocks for all innovation,” Laine added. “If we fail to adequately fund basic research, we are closing the door that leads to the scientific, medical and technological advancements that power our economy.”
Before electricity arrives at our homes or businesses, it must first be generated at a remote location and transmitted over a power grid. While the current system reliably supplies us with power each day, there remains room for improvement. That’s where the Texas A&M Smart Grid Center comes into play.