houck2040/research_news huggingface dataset:
The Texas A&M Smart Grid Center brings together teams of faculty and student researchers, as well as industry professionals, to modernize current infrastructure, behavior, business models, and public policies. Their goal is to safeguard the United States against energy disasters, such as the 2003 Northeast Blackout. By creating innovative energy solutions today, the Center is working to meet the needs of future generations.
Find out more at the Texas A&M Smart Grid Center.
Though nations like 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, Texas A&M University Vice President for Research Glen Laine told science journalists at the National Press Club.
Laine joined representatives from several other top research institutions in a media briefing titled “All Things Research 2014.” The media roundtable session last week, sponsored by the Association of American Universities (AAU) and The Science Coalition, provided the top research officials from several institutions 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 like 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 told the reporters. “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 said later. “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.”
Roundtable highlights can be viewed here.
Texas A&M, in conjunction with its associated agencies, ranks among the national leaders in research with an investment of more than $800 million with studies in hundreds of different fields.
Laine, who has been associated with Texas A&M for 30 years, was named Texas A&M’s vice president for research on Feb. 17 after serving as interim for nine months. He also serves as a Regents Professor and holder of the Wiseman Chair in Cardiology in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. He serves as director of the Michael E. DeBakey Institute for Cardiovascular Science and Biomedical Devices  and was associate dean for graduate studies for five years.
While continuing to teach, Laine has maintained extramural grant support for 35 years, generating approximately 150 publications in peer-reviewed basic science, medical, engineering, and educational journals along with approximately 200 abstracts. He is principal investigator on a 2013 Texas Emerging Technology Fund grant to link Texas A&M and the Texas Heart Institute in Houston through a cardiac research collaboration.
Laine received his doctorate in physiology and biophysics with a minor in biomedical engineering from Texas A&M’s College of Medicine. He has received the Association of Former Students’ Distinguished Achievement Award in Research and serves as a reviewer for 17 national journals and has been a member of study sections for several national funding agencies.
Karen L. Wooley, a distinguished professor of chemistry who conducts laboratory research at Texas A&M University, has been selected as one of three international recipients of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize for 2014.
The Centenary Prize is awarded annually to outstanding chemists from overseas who also are exceptional communicators and, as such, are invited to deliver lectures on their award-winning research within the British Isles during the next academic year. It was founded in 1947 to commemorate the centenary of what was then known as the Chemical Society in 1841.
Wooley is cited “for transforming the field of polymer chemistry through the adaptation of synthetic organic chemistry concepts and the concept of macromolecular engineering.” In addition to an invited lectureship opportunity, she will receive £5000, a medal and a certificate.
The Centenary Prize is part of a broader overall recognition portfolio that includes more than 60 prizes and awards designed to reward outstanding work carried out by scientists in specialized areas spanning the breadth of the chemical sciences, from research and education to business and industry.
The Royal Society of Chemistry is the world’s leading chemistry community for advancing excellence in the chemical sciences.
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A $100 million fund at The Texas A&M University System known as the Chancellor’s Research Initiative (CRI) is credited for successfully attracting four world renowned scholars and researchers to elevate the engineering research portfolio:
* Christodoulos A. Floudas, professor of engineering and applied science, Princeton University.
* E.N. Pistikopoulos, professor of chemical engineering, Imperial College of London.
* Alan Needleman, professor of materials science and engineering in the College of Engineering, University of North Texas.
* Peter M. Rentzepis, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, University of California at Irvine.
“These are superstars in the academic community in engineering research, respected by their peers as members of the prestigious national academies, and the caliber of scholar that every university aggressively courts,” said Chancellor John Sharp. “The CRI seeks to find outstanding researchers who can not only produce amazing work, but also bring in some much needed funding to support that work.”
Leveraging vast experience in developing and implementing large, multi-investigator, federally funded programs, each brings strength in key areas: Floudas and Pistikopoulos in process control and optimization, Needleman in computational materials, and Rentzepis in ultrafast spectroscopy and X-ray lasers.
Photo: Texas A&M AgriLife Research
Texas A&M AgriLife Research was ranked No. 1 in agricultural sciences expenditures for fiscal year 2012, the latest year for which figures are available, according to the National Science Foundation.
The agency, part of the Texas A&M University System, accounted for more than $176.4 million of the nearly $3.3 billion spent on agricultural research by more than 30 U.S. universities, surpassing the University of Florida, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, University of California-Davis and Purdue University in the top five positions.
Professor Robert S. Levine, one of the first nationally prominent scholars selected by the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (TIAS) to come to the campus here for extended interaction with faculty and students, has been presented the Hubbell Award by the Modern Language Association for “lifetime achievement.” He is believed to be the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious literary award.
Levine, whose permanent position is professor of English at the University of Maryland, where he  holds the title of Distinguished University Professor and is the founding director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, conducted a portion of his academic work last year at Texas A&M as a TIAS Faculty Fellow.
He will be returning to Texas A&M later this month. While on campus, he works most closely with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts.
NBC News interviewed Texas A&M robotics pioneer Robin Murphy for its recent story about the use of robot actors in productions on Broadway and in Tokyo.
Murphy is Raytheon Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and is considered a founder in the fields of rescue robots and human-robot interaction.
Leif Andersson, a 2013-16 Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (TIAS) Faculty Fellow from Uppsala University, Sweden, was chosen as a recipient of the 2014 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, the Wolf Foundation has announced.
Andersson will shared the award, and its $100,000 prize, with Jorge Dubcovsky of the University of California Davis, as they are both being honored for their use of cutting-edge genomic technologies that contribute to animal and plant research, respectively. The Wolf Prize is often referred to as equivalent to the Nobel Prize.