Newsletter Issue 7
From the Founding Director
We are busy finalizing the recruitment of the Hagler Institute’s Faculty Fellows for 2019-2020. This impressive group of very accomplished scholars will come to Texas A&M for up to one year to collaborate with our faculty and students on research and to provide their perspectives on the frontiers of knowledge. I look forward to introducing them to you in mid-September. This will be among our largest class of Fellows, and they represent excellence across a broad set of disciplines. For now, I am proud to present to you our 7 th newsletter. We know you will be interested to read about just a few of the recent activities and honors for some of the scholars that the Hagler Institute has brought to Texas A&M. It is gratifying and exciting to see the ongoing impact and accomplishments of the scholars we are attracting to Texas A&M.

Best wishes to all,
Faculty Fellow Features
Michael Duff, 2018-2019 Faculty Fellow of the Hagler Institute who works with the Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering at Texas A&M, is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the field of supergravity. His research often focuses on unifying quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and he has authored groundbreaking studies in unified theories of the elementary particles. In a recent paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics , “Black Holes and General Freudenthal Transformations,” Professor Duff and his co-authors focus on black hole solutions in Einstein-Maxwell – Scalar super gravity theories.
Gerald Galloway, a world- renowned flood expert and 2016-2017 Faculty Fellow of the Hagler Institute, was a co-author on “Resiliently Engineered Flood and Hurricane Infrastructure: Principles to Guide the Next Generation of Engineers” in the Summer 2019 issue of THE BRIDGE . THE BRIDGE is the official publication of the National Academy of Engineering, in which prominent engineers share information. Articles chosen for publication must be high quality and the message important.   Professor Galloway is based at the University of Maryland but continues to collaborate with Texas A&M faculty and students, particularly those at Texas A&M's Galveston campus. 
Robert Skelton, 2014-2015 Faculty Fellow of the Hagler Institute and now Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Distinguished Research Professor, was recently interviewed for his work on space habitats by the Voice of America, the world’s largest news and broadcast organization. Dr. Skelton has teamed up with fellow researchers in an effort to design, construct, and bring to life a space habitat that would allow long-term space travel. Skelton is principal investigator of the project which is funded by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a self-sufficient space habitat for further space exploration and to solve some of the problems that astronauts have been facing since man first entered space. The habitat would rotate to create gravity, countering health problems caused by Zero-G, provide radiation protection, an area to grow crops, and expansion capability. With a size of 500 meters, there would be room for 8,000 people, and as Skelton envisions, lakes, trees, and animals. Skelton's team designed the habitat using “tensegrity”, a field he pioneered that uses light materials assembled in such a way as to form very strong structures. Skelton also aims to design robots that can build the structure with materials from space regolith, a layer of material such as rock or dust that rests on top of bedrock in asteroids and the moon. The project will come to a close with a report to NASA, and if subsequent steps are taken, structures will be built to test the materials that would be used to form the habitat.
Wolfgang Schleich, a member of the 2013-2014 class of Faculty Fellows, was recently elected an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for his contributions to physics. The Hagler Institute extends congratulations to Wolfgang for this latest honor. Since Wolfgang completed his term in the Hagler Institute, he has returned to Texas A&M University many times from his home institution in Germany, Ulm University. His collaborations are an outstanding example of continuing research alliances fostered with help from the Hagler Institute. Wolfgang has co-authored several articles with noted Texas A&M University physicists Marlan Scully and David Lee, a Nobel Prize recipient. Wolfgang has also co-authored research papers with former Faculty Fellow from the class of 2013-2014, another Nobel Prize recipient, the late Roy Glauber. We hear he is also married to a Texan. Will she someday talk him into returning to “God’s Country” for good?  
James Hubbard, 2017-2018 Faculty Fellow, who is now on the permanent faculty of the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering , is the Founder and Director of STARLAB. STARLAB contains 44 high definition synchronized cameras, and within its 40'x40'x30' area Hubbard directs one of the premiere motion capture labs in the nation. STARLAB can be used to record data for a variety of engineering research. See some of the amazing work in this short video that Hubbard is doing with our graduate students, getting them to participate in every aspect of the frontiers of motion capture.
Jack Dongarra, 2014-2015 Faculty Fellow from Oak Ridge National Lab and the University of Tennessee, has had a monumental impact on high performance computing. In April 2019 Professor Dongarra was named a Foreign Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society of London, joining the ranks of such scientists as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Professor Dongarra is best known for LINPACK, BLAS and other open source linear algebra packages for parallel computing, but he has developed many other numerical and performance monitoring open source software packages. He also annually compiles a well known list of the world’s fastest, most powerful supercomputers. In the picture Professor Dongarra is talking with Texas A&M students at a reception following his presentation on supercomputers at the Hagler Institute’s Spring 2017 Eminent Scholar Lecture. 
Stefan Kaufman, who collaborates with faculty and students in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences when at Texas A&M, was included in Expertscape’s prestigious category of “World Expert in Vaccination”. Expertscape, which provides information about medical experts located nationally and internationally, announced on July 22, 2019 that Professor Kaufman was in the top 0.1% of scholars writing about vaccination over the last decade. Professor Kaufman also co-authored an additional publication in the July 26, 2019 issue of Scientific Reports entitled “The Henna pigment Lawsone activates the Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor and impacts skin homeostasis.”  
If you have news to share, please send articles, suggestions, or other information to
Dr. Clifford L. Fry, Associate Director,
Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M University, cfry@tamu.edu .