houck2040/research_news huggingface dataset:
Jessica Howell, associate professor, Department of English, College of Liberal Arts, will complete research for a monograph that will draw upon women’s and gender studies, life-writing studies and postcolonialism to analyze literary and cultural figures.
Hyeran Jo, associate professor, Department of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts, will conduct research on the effectiveness of countries, international organizations and international civil society actors in reducing sexual violence inside global-conflict zones.
Hilaire Kallendorf, professor, Department of Hispanic Studies, College of Liberal Arts, will draw upon a database of 800 Spanish plays from 1550-1700 and employ digital humanities methodology to consider these works an archive of moral knowledge.
Alain Lawo-Sukam, associate professor, Department of Hispanic Studies, College of Liberal Arts, will examine the division between Peninsularists and Latin Americanists that has obscured the history of Spain in Africa and African-Hispanic literature.
Jennifer Mercieca, associate professor, Department of Communications, College of Liberal Arts, will conduct research for a book to analyze modern propaganda techniques.
Zachary Stewart, assistant professor, Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, will produce a book that investigates the medieval parish church as one of the earliest settings for collective material production in the West.
The Arts & Humanities Fellows Program funded by Texas A&M University’s Division of Research released its second series of animated shorts to explore the outstanding scholarship and creativity produced by the program’s Class of 2016.
Each animated short describes a research or creative 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 second to receive funding from the program. The videos are available at https://vpr.tamu.edu/initiate-research/arts-and-humanities-fellows/2016-fellows.
“This program demonstrates Texas A&M’s ongoing commitment to investing in the arts and humanities, which represent both sources and measures of the vibrancy of our society,” said Vice President of Research Mark A. Barteau. “To provide a showcase for the extraordinary ideas and images of our 2016 Arts & Humanities Fellows, our animation team has created a new series of brief, impactful videos designed to engage audiences and demonstrate the vision of our scholars.”
The second in a series of animated shorts, produced by Research Communications and Public Relations, feature the following Arts & Humanities Fellows and their funded projects:
The Arts & Humanities Fellows Program plans to release animated shorts about the classes of 2017-20 as well as future classes.
The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has named two faculty members from Texas A&M University to its 2021 class of NAI Senior Members, the Division of Research announced today.
NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists and administrators from NAI member institutions with success in patents, licensing and commercialization. They have produced technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society. The 2021 class includes 63 accomplished academic inventors who are named on 625 issued U.S. patents and who represent 37 NAI member institutions, research universities, governmental entities and non-profit institutes worldwide.
The two new NAI Senior Members from Texas A&M are from the College of Engineering:
The NAI established the title of NAI Senior Member in 2019. The selection of Biswas and Jafari brings the number of current Texas A&M faculty members who are NAI Senior Members to 11. In addition, 13 current A&M faculty members are NAI Fellows.
“Congratulations to Dr. Biswas and Dr. Jafari for earning this distinction,” said Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau, an NAI Fellow.  “Also, thank you to the NAI for recognizing the innovations of our outstanding A&M faculty members in the ongoing quest for solutions that better the human condition and address our world’s most challenging problems.”
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 $1.131 billion in fiscal year 2020. Texas A&M ranked in the top 25 of the most recent National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development survey based on expenditures of more than $952 million in fiscal year 2019. 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. research.tamu.edu
Media contact: Research Communications and Public Relations, research-communications@tamu.edu
A federally approved heart medication shows significant effectiveness interfering with SARS-CoV-2 entry into the human cell host, according to a new study by a research team from Texas A&M University and The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB).
The medication bepridil, which goes by the trade name Vascor, is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat angina, a heart condition.
The team’s leaders are Wenshe Ray Liu, professor and holder of the Gradipore Chair, Department of Chemistry, College of Science, Texas A&M, and Chien-Te Kent Tseng, professor and director of the SARS/MERS/COVID-19 Laboratory, UTMB. Liu also holds joint faculty positions in Texas A&M’s colleges of medicine and agriculture and life sciences.
“Only one FDA approved medication is currently available, Remdesivir, to provide limited benefits to COVID-19 patients, and the virus may easily evade it,” said Liu. “Finding alternative medicines is imperative.
“Our team screened more than 30 FDA/European Medicines Agency approved drugs for their ability to inhibit SARS-COV-2’s entry into human cells,” according to Liu. “The study found bepridil to offer the most potential for treatment of COVID-19. As a result, we are advocating for the serious consideration of using bepridil in clinical tests related to SARS-CoV-2.”
The Texas A&M-UTMB study is now available at the website of the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) and is scheduled for print publication on March 9.
The team, which includes six other researchers from Texas A&M and four from UTMB, now plans to advance their work to animal models with a potential for clinical trials.
In addition to Liu, the team includes Shiqing Xu, research associate professor; Kai S. Yang, postdoctoral research associate; and graduate students Erol C. Vatansever, Kaci C. Kratch and Chia-Chuan Cho, all from the Department of Chemistry, College of Science; and Drake M. Mellott, graduate student, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, all from Texas A&M; and UTMB colleagues Aleksandra K. Drelich, Kempaiah Rayavara Kempaiah, Jason C. Hsu and Chien-Te K. Tseng.
The project received seed funding in 2020 from Texas A&M’s X-Grants program, an initiative of the 10-year, $100 million President’s Excellence Fund and the Texas A&M Translational Investment Fund.
Media contact: Wenshe Liu, wsliu2007@tamu.edu
Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) and Texas A&M University partnered to increase research collaborations between the two institutions. PVAMU, a land-grant, Historically Black University (HBCU), partnered with Texas A&M, a land-grant research university, to support 30 faculty over several research projects with a total of $300,000 through the Panther Research and Innovation for Scholarly Excellence (PRISE) Grant Program. The collaboration was launched to encourage and support multidisciplinary projects between the two institutions in response to the ever-growing trend of federal funding agencies to support convergent efforts of diverse expertise to solve complex societal challenges.
Application to the new program required the submission of proposals from investigator teams (known as “Triads”) consisting of one PVAMU and two Texas A&M tenured or tenure-track faculty members.  Twenty-nine proposals were received for the initial five awards. Each submission was reviewed by three PVAMU and Texas A&M faculty members. Due to the outstanding reviews many projects received, additional funds were secured to double the number of initially announced awards.
Each of the selected projects is awarded a seed grant of $30,000 for one year—$10,000 from PVAMU and $20,000 from Texas A&M for their respective scholars. It is anticipated that the investigator teams will be able to make substantial progress and submit strong proposals to external funding agencies in the next year to continue their work.  “The PRISE initiative is an example of how inter-institutional scholarly research projects build relationships to discover ongoing professional and research opportunities,” PVAMU Vice President for Research & Innovation Magesh Rajan stated.  “There is an emergent acknowledgment of the essential value of inter-institutional collaboration, which is made increasingly more attainable by the evolution of current technologies­.”
“The PRISE program generates outstanding opportunities for faculty members from PVAMU and Texas A&M faculty to forge new collaborations,” Texas A&M Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said. “We have enjoyed great success with similar programs at our flagship campus—such as Texas A&M Triads for Transformation and X-Grants. We look forward to the exciting results of these new explorations in cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research.”
In addition to Texas A&M, the Office for Research & Innovation at PVAMU partnered with the Office of Provost and Academic Affairs at PVAMU to support the initiative.
The following projects and Triads were selected for the Panther-RISE Grant Awards:
Both PVAMU and Texas A&M are members of The Texas A&M University System.
The Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M University released its first-ever digital, online-only issue of its annual report, Cornerstone, today.
The issue is now available at https://hias.tamu.edu/cornerstone-2020.
The Hagler Institute’s 2020 edition of Cornerstone adapted its format from the traditional print magazine to an online design to better engage with the Institute’s audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Institute’s annual report introduces the 2020-21 class of Hagler Fellows and provides insight into research accomplishments by former Hagler Fellows and their Texas A&M collaborators. The report also details the internal operations of the Institute and includes a video version of its annual Letter from the Director.
“This year’s Cornerstone is an interesting experiment. Instead of our usual glossy paper report, we have produced an online version. This allows a number of innovative and more interactive features,” said John L. Junkins, interim president of Texas A&M and founding director of the Hagler Institute. “As will be evident, in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had a wonderful year and are blessed to have a truly breathtaking ninth class of Hagler Fellows.”
The Institute has published Cornerstone annually as a print publication since 2013 while also offering the annual report online as a portable document file (PDF).
Texas A&M Triads for Transformation (T3) has closed its fourth round, providing $3 million in seed funding for 100 innovative and interdisciplinary research projects, each led by a three-member team of Texas A&M University faculty members, the Division of Research announced today.
Funded projects include investigations or improvements in a wide range of areas, including automobile technology, COVID-19 and cancer research, virtual simulation, artificial intelligence, emission reduction, neuroscience, biodiversity, social networks, space exploration and more.
A complete list of funded Round 4 projects is available at the T3 website.
“The T3 program inspires innovative collaboration among Texas A&M’s exceptional faculty members by creating new pathways between academic colleges and schools,” Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said. “This process forges new and dynamic relationships between research teams that lead to innovative approaches and solutions to globally challenging problems.”
T3, an initiative of the 10-year, $100 million President’s Excellence Fund, invests $3 million each year in 100 faculty-led projects at $30,000 each. Funded projects are designed for completion within 12 to 24 months.
Round 4 of the T3 program began in October 2020, and closed in mid-December 2020.
Each year, the T3 program invites all of Texas A&M’s tenured or tenure-track faculty to submit project ideas, which are posted online for all eligible A&M faculty members to review. To qualify for funding, a project leader must attract two other faculty members to form a Triad, which must include members from at least two different A&M colleges or schools. A semi-random process then selects 100 projects for funding from the pool of qualified Triads; this process is weighted toward Triads that include at least one assistant professor. Of the 300 faculty members funded in T3’s Round 4, 109 are assistant professors, 92 associate professors and 99 professors.
Funded Triads for all four rounds included faculty members from 16 A&M colleges and schools, University Libraries and the branch campuses in Galveston and Qatar.
Three faculty members from The Texas A&M University System are among the 175 distinguished academic inventors selected as 2020 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellows, the Division of Research announced today.
“I applaud the NAI for selecting these three outstanding researchers as 2020 fellows,” Mark A. Barteau, vice president for research at Texas A&M University and an NAI Fellow, said. “This honor recognizes their scholarship, talent and innovation, as well as their ongoing commitment to Texas A&M’s mission to produce innovations and solutions that address our world’s greatest challenges.”
The NAI will induct the following A&M System faculty members during its 10th annual national meeting, which is scheduled for June 2021, in Tampa, Fla.:
Their induction will bring to 14 the total number of current or past Texas A&M faculty members who have been selected as NAI Fellows since the organization named its charter fellows in 2012.
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 the quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. To date, NAI Fellows hold more than 42,700 issued U.S. patents, which have generated more than 13,000 licensed technologies and companies, and created more than 36 million jobs. In addition, more than $2.2 trillion in revenue has been generated based on NAI Fellow discoveries.
Beginning in December 2020, Texas A&M University will offer researchers a new flagship high-performance computing (HPC) platform.  Named in memory of programming pioneer Vice Admiral Grace Hopper, the Grace supercomputer, powered by Dell Technologies, will serve as a platform for ground-breaking discoveries and innovations in science and engineering at Texas A&M. The new Grace supercomputer will replace the Ada supercomputer, which has served as the lead supercomputer at Texas A&M’s High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) since 2014.
“The Grace system represents the next generation of supercomputing—reshaping how science and engineering are transforming massive data into solutions that address the world’s greatest challenges,” Texas A&M Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said. “In the groundbreaking research performed today, access to superior high-performance computing is vital to our mission of advancing knowledge and inspiring innovation. Grace will enable researchers in the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS) and across the University to tackle problems once thought impractical or impossible.”
The computing power of a supercomputer is measured as “flops,” which stands for “floating point operations per second.” A floating-point operation is any calculation that involves numbers that contain decimal points. One trillion flops equal a teraflop; one quadrillion flops equal a petaflop. It takes 1,000 teraflops to equal one petaflop. At peak performance, the current Ada supercomputer can process 337 teraflops. The new Grace supercomputer will handle up to 6.2 petaflops, making the platform almost 20 times more powerful than Ada.
“HPRC has a mission to infuse computational and data analysis technologies into the research and creative activities of every academic discipline at Texas A&M,” said Honggao Liu, executive director of HPRC. “We support compute- and data-intensive workloads and enable researchers to use cutting-edge processor, accelerator and data analytic technologies to solve complex research problems. In this era of converged demand for advanced computing resources, a new supercomputer like Grace is needed to support complex workflows and allow researchers to continue in their pursuit of discoveries and inventions. Grace will allow A&M researchers to take significant strides in HPC, artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, while simultaneously preparing a workforce for exascale computing, which will handle a quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1018) calculations per second. Grace will greatly enhance A&M’s research capabilities and competitiveness and allow A&M researchers to keep pace with current trends in research computing technologies.”
The Grace cluster responds to the growing demand for advanced supercomputing in science and engineering research. Over the last four years, Texas A&M HPRC has seen its user base roughly double from more than 1,300 in 2016 to more than 2,600 in 2020.  Grace’s architecture will support Texas A&M researchers in disparate fields such as drug design, materials science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, geosciences, fluid dynamics, biomedical applications, biophysics, genetics, quantum computing, data analytics, population informatics and autonomous vehicles.
Funding for the Grace system comes from Texas A&M University and the Texas A&M Research Development Fund with contributions from the Texas A&M Health Science Center, the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and several individual faculty members in the College of Engineering and the College of Science.
Texas A&M purchased its first supercomputer in 1989 and generally operates two large-scale supercomputers concurrently on the College Station campus. The oldest is replaced every three to four years. The University last replaced one of its supercomputers in 2016.
Primary vendor and partners
Dell Technologies is the primary vendor for the Grace system.
“Texas A&M delivers research and innovation that require incredible breadth and depth to achieve,” said Thierry Pellegrino, VP/GM HPC at Dell Technologies. “Our goal is to help the HPRC team deploy Grace because it enables data analytics, visualization, modeling and simulation that will drive human progress.”
Additionally, there are three partners that provided specific components for the system. The central processing units come from Intel, the storage system from DDN, and the graphics processing units and InfiniBand interconnect network from NVIDIA.
Trish Damkroger, vice president and general manager of high-performance computing at Intel, said, “The Grace supercomputer will open a broad range of opportunities for Texas A&M University researchers to make groundbreaking discoveries in many application domains. Intel’s expertise in delivering advanced HPC hardware and software environments will enable researchers to harness the power of HPC and artificial intelligence and push the boundaries of what modern supercomputers can be.”
DDN President and Co-Founder Paul Bloch said, “DDN truly values our long-standing relationship with Texas A&M University, and are thrilled that DDN Intelligent Infrastructure solutions will be integrated into all the shared HPC/AI data storage within the new Grace cluster. Our ES7990X systems are designed to effortlessly and reliably provide unfettered access to complex distributed data sets and supply maximum application efficiency, thereby assuring the best ROI for Texas A&M.”
NVIDIA Director of Higher Education and Research Cheryl Martin said, “Universities and research institutions around the world use NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform to create high-performance computing facilities that propel innovation. The researchers at Texas A&M using the Grace supercomputer will be able to take advantage of our latest NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs and HDR InfiniBand to boost performance and drive discovery with AI, accelerated analytics and simulation.”
Technical specifications
Grace is an integrated computational research platform that combines Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with cutting-edge 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, NVIDIA A100, NVIDIA T4 and NVIDIA RTX 6000 Tensor Core GPUs, an NVIDIA Mellanox HDR100 InfiniBand network, NVMe-based local storage and high-performance DDN EXAScaler® ES7990X™ storage.
The Grace cluster is composed of 800 regular compute nodes, 100 double precision NVIDIA A100 GPU compute nodes, eight large memory (three terabyte) compute nodes, eight single precision NVIDIA T4 GPU compute nodes, nine single precision NVIDIA RTX 6000 GPU compute nodes, five login nodes and six management nodes. All nodes are powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
The Grace cluster has an NVIDIA low-latency HDR InfiniBand interconnect and 5.12 petabytes of high-performance DDN storage running the EXAScaler parallel filesystem. Each regular and GPU compute node is equipped with two 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable 24-core 3.0GHz processors and 384GB DDR4 3200MHz memory, while each of eight large memory nodes has four 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable 20-core 2.5 GHz processors and 3.072 terabytes of DDR4 3200MHz memory.
©2020 All rights reserved. DDN and EXAScaler are registered trademarks and ES7990X is a trademark owned by DataDirect Networks.
Intel, the Intel logo and other Intel names are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.
Six postdoctoral researchers received awards for flash-talk and poster presentations at Texas A&M University’s Fourth Annual Postdoctoral Research Symposium, held in celebration of National Postdoc Appreciation Week.
The Texas A&M Postdoctoral Association, the Health Science Center Postdoctoral Association and the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences Postdoctoral Association worked together to produce organize the first virtual edition of the Symposium.
The Sept. 23 Symposium featured more than 40 postdoctoral participants presenting their research to an audience of 162 fellow postdocs, faculty members and staff from 17 colleges and schools.
Awards were given in two categories to the following postdoctoral research associates:
“When we started planning for this symposium in the early spring, we could not have anticipated how transitioning to an online format could have turned out so well,” Andreea Trache, faculty advisor for the Texas A&M Postdoctoral Association and associate professor, College of Medicine, said. “We are very pleased with the broad participation and high number of attendees from across Texas A&M campuses. Moreover, the quality of the presentations, both for flash talks and poster presentations, reflected the complexity of the research performed by Texas A&M postdocs and their professionalism.”
Speakers for the Symposium included Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau; Interim Dean Amy Waer, College of Medicine; and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies Robert Burghardt, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences; and keynote speaker Nancy Ryan Gray, president and chief executive officer of Gordon Research Conferences.