Hagler Institute for Advanced Study Newsletter

From the Director

As founding director, I am pleased to bring you the first issue of our newsletter. Now in its sixth year, the Institute has attracted fifty-two world-class scholars to Texas A&M University, frequently altering the careers of students and faculty while adding more advocates and supporters every year. Through this newsletter, we will update you on the latest news from the Institute. We look forward to your comments.

Best wishes to all,

— John L. Junkins

Faculty Fellows

Leif Andersson

Leif Andersson , a Faculty Fellow from the Class of 2013-14, was among thirty-two scholars recently elected as new members of the American Philosophical Society. He joins a truly elite organization, which has 1,019 living members and has elected only 5,605 members since its founding by Benjamin Franklin in 1743. Members represent all fields of science, humanities, and the arts, and include George Washington, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. Dr. Andersson studies genetic variation and phenotypic variation in domestic animals to help understand the underlying genetic basis for inherited disorders, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and multifactorial traits, such as metabolic regulation and growth. He now splits his time between the permanent faculty of Texas A&M’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and Uppsala University in Sweden. He received the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2014 and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Ingrid Daubechies

Ingrid Daubechies , a Faculty Fellow from the Class of 2016-17, will receive her letters of nobility as Baroness in her native land of Belgium on November 11, in recognition of her many outstanding contributions to mathematics. Her body of work in approximation methods, which includes the “Daubechies wavelets”, makes possible the now very common JPEG compressed images used in digital movies and many Internet applications. Dr. Daubechies is among the world’s most cited mathematicians and is the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences as well as the French Academy of Sciences and the Belgian Royal Academy.

External Advisory Board

October Meeting

The Hagler Institute’s External Advisory Board met in Dallas during October with Texas A&M University President Michael K. Young . Chairman of the Board Norman R. Augustine , former chair and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, welcomed President Young as well as new board member H. Norman Abramson , former executive vice president of Southwest Research Institute and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Founding Director John L. Junkins presented a report on the Institute’s activities, after which the board met in private session. The Board’s recommendations included specific actions for securing the financial and structural stability of the Institute so that it has a strong foundation to face challenges and eventual personnel transitions. Chair Augustine thanked departing board member Anita Jones for her contributions and insights. Dr. Jones is Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and former director of Defense Research and Engineering at the US Department of Defense.

Advocates in Action

Jon L. Hagler

The Hagler Institute is particularly indebted to Jon Hagler ’58 , a longtime supporter of Texas A&M and co-chair of the Vision 2020 strategic plan. Jon understood the transformative impact of the Institute and committed $20 million to endow the Institute that now bears his name. Thanks to Jon Hagler’s significant gift, the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study is now a permanent part of Texas A&M University. Each year through perpetuity, the Hagler Institute will bring the finest scholars in the world to Texas A&M for up to twelve months each to collaborate on research with our faculty and students and share their knowledge in special presentations and symposiums. The Institute helps to put Texas A&M University on a perpetual upward path of excellence. I invite you to read the Texas A&M Foundation’s “Great Minds” article about Jon Hagler and to watch the brief-but-splendid video interview with one of Texas A&M’s leading benefactors.

Jess “Rick” Rickman

Our advocates have careers that often provide inspirational stories. For example, Jess “Rick” Rickman , a prominent Dallas attorney, was named to Texas Monthly’s list of Super Lawyers in 2003-05 and 2011. His devotion to Texas A&M has been consistent since he was a student and member of Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets. Rick has been a Muster speaker, was Chair of the 12th Man Foundation, was a lieutenant in the US Army, was elected to the Corps of Cadets Hall of Honor, and was president of the Lettermen’s Club, to name a few of his activities. Rick has attended induction galas of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, has spoken on behalf of the Hagler Institute at a meeting of Dallas A&M Club, and has attended as a special guest at the Institute’s External Advisory Board meeting.

Collaboration with Texas A&M Students

Based at the University of Colorado, Michael D. King , Faculty Fellow of the Hagler Institute in the class of 2015-2016 academic year, has been in residence at Texas A&M during select months over multiple years. Michael King’s leadership on NASA’s Terra and Aqua Earth Science satellite projects played an important role in developing the unprecedented capabilities of the U.S. space program to monitor Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land. Dr. King has joined forces on several frontier journal articles with Texas A&M faculty. He also helped Jiachen Ding , graduate student in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Geosciences, develop research ideas into a refereed article on which (now Dr.) Ding had lead authorship in the 2017 edition of Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer .

In Jiachen’s own words, “The Hagler Institute Heep fellowship provided me a valuable opportunity to broaden my scientific background knowledge and horizons, and learn state-of-the-art advances in my research field by working with Dr. Michael King.”

When Jiachen entered the Ph.D. program in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences he knew he would work with the outstanding faculty at Texas A&M, but he did not know that he would also get to collaborate with one of the world’s renowned atmospheric scientists at the University of Colorado. Mentoring by world class scholars is key to development of future scientists, and is the essence of how the Hagler Institute Faculty Fellows enrich the educational opportunities at Texas A&M University.

Dr. Roy Glauber is an institution unto himself. In 2005, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum optics explaining the fundamental characteristics of different types of light. He is one of the few living scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. During World War II, at age eighteen, as a junior at Harvard University, Dr. Glauber helped calculate the critical mass for the first atom bomb. Since Glauber finished his 2013-14 academic year term as a Faculty Fellow, he has returned to Texas A&M several times to participate in key lectures and physics research symposiums, inspiring many individuals. Among them is Timur Akhmedzhanov , a graduate student at A&M, who received a Hagler Institute fellowship to work with Dr. Glauber.

Timur says, “I achieved important results in my research with Dr. Glauber and A&M faculty collaborators, and I developed a deeper understanding of physics in general.” Timur earned his doctorate from the Department of Physics and Astronomy in May 2017. Before graduating, he published three refereed journal articles with two more under consideration. Timur is now a geophysicist based in Houston for Down Under Solutions, a firm with headquarters in Australia that provides a diverse range of services and products to the global oil and gas industry.

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.