Newsletter Issue 24, December 2021 |
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From the Founding Director |
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The Hagler Institute brings the world’s most accomplished and renowned scholars to Texas A&M. Because fellows of the Hagler Institute are on campus for up to one year, they have the opportunity to engage in intense research with Texas A&M’s senior faculty and its rising star junior faculty, as well as present multiple lectures. The Hagler Institute provides two graduate student fellowships per fellow to ensure that Texas A&M’s top students have the opportunity to team with Hagler Fellows and their hosts on challenging research projects. These associations can fundamentally enhance students’ career options.
The time Hagler Fellows spend on campus provides them with more extensive information about Texas A&M when compared to short-term visitors and allows them to form close relationships with faculty and students. Some fellows decide to join A&M’s faculty. With the support of our excellence objectives by Texas A&M’s President M. Katherine Banks and Chancellor John Sharp, coupled with Governor Abbott’s research initiative (a program that provides funds to Texas universities to hire academy level talent), Texas A&M is able to offer attractive financial packages to academy level scholars like our Hagler Fellows.
The Winter 2021 Issue of Spirit, the Texas A&M Foundation’s magazine, includes an article “Venue for Visionaries.” This article focuses on the influence of Jon Hagler ‘58 through his support of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. The Spirit article notes the addition to A&M’s faculty of Robert Kennicutt Jr. in physics and astronomy, Alan Needleman in materials science and engineering, and Leif Andersson in animal genetics. Other additions to A&M’s faculty that were previously fellows of the Hagler Institute are mentioned.
In its first ten years, the Hagler Institute has brought 88 world-class scholars to Texas A&M. The result from this first decade is that more than 20% of fellows who have completed their time in the Hagler Institute have joined A&M’s permanent faculty. If this percentage persists for the more than thirty scholars still active in the Hagler Institute, an additional six or seven fellows could join A&M’s faculty over the next three to five years.
The Spirit article refers to the Hagler Institute as a center for exceptionalism. The enhancement of exceptionalism at Texas A&M is unbounded with broad university support and continuing donor participation in the mission of the Hagler Institute.
Best Wishes,
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Two Fellows of the Hagler Institute
Join Texas A&M's Faculty
Luiz Davidovich, Class of 2019-20, and William Unruh, Class of 2018-19, have joined the faculty of Texas A&M’s Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering (IQSE) and will come to Texas A&M for 4.5 months each year for five years.
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Davidovich joined the Hagler Institute when he was a professor of physics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research is in the areas of decoherence, dynamics of entanglement, laser theory, and quantum metrology. He is the recipient of the Brazilian Grand-Cross of the National Order of Scientific Merit and the Brazilian National Prize of Science and Technology, and he holds the office of president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Davidovich is a foreign associate in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a member of the World Academy of Sciences (for advancement of science in developing countries), and a fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society. |
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William Unruh, professor of physics at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has focused his research on general relativity. Unruh is well known for his collaborations with the late Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge. Hawking visited A&M several times in the last decade of his life and was here for a month on his last visit. Together, Unruh and Hawking refined the foundations of quantum mechanics in relation to black holes.
Unruh holds the Rutherford Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Medal of Achievement from the Canadian Association of Physicists. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of both London and Canada and is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Unruh and Davidovich have joined a rich intellectual environment at Texas A&M. At the Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering, headed by University Distinguished Professor Marlan Scully, professors and students from Texas A&M’s colleges and institutes collaborate on research across multiple fields. Their underlying focus is on quantum optics and photonics. Areas included in their research are quantum philosophy, laser physics, bioscience, nanoscience, and quantum informatics. This research impacts industry, water management, food processing, active imaging, and medicine, as well as other areas.
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Ned Thomas Gets Icing
on His Cake
It is always a career boost to get a peer-reviewed article published in a great journal. It is “icing on the cake” to be featured on the cover of that journal.
Edwin “Ned” Thomas, 2019-20 fellow of the Hagler Institute, and his three co-authors got icing on their research cake, as the October 2021 issue of Macromolecules honored their work, “Black Copolymers beneath the Surface: Measuring and Modeling Complex Morphology at the Subdomain Level,” by using images from their article on its cover.
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Thomas joined Texas A&M’s faculty in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and holds the Erle Nye ’59 Chair II. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and came to Texas A&M from Rice University. Thomas served as dean of engineering at Rice and previous to that served as head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An internationally respected researcher, Thomas has published more than 450 peer reviewed journal articles, and he holds 20 patents. |
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Kaufmann Continues to Tackle Tuberculosis
Stefan H.E. Kaufmann, from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany and 2018-19 fellow of the Hagler Institute, has delayed some of his visits to Texas A&M and the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences due to the pandemic. However, he and his wife, Elke, are scheduled to return to College Station for three months at the beginning of 2022.
Kaufmann is actively attempting to eradicate tuberculosis in India, as has been reported in earlier newsletters. We have seen three major publications by Kaufmann and his co-authors in recent months. “Gene Set Enrichment Analysis Reveals Individual Variability in Host Responses in Tuberculosis Patients” appeared in Frontiers in Immunology in August 2021. This complex work deciphers differences among tuberculosis patients. He is one of the most cited scientists in the world.
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Permanent Member of the Institute Receives $24 million Grant
Scholars who are members of one of the congressionally mandated national academies are widely recognized as some of the best in their field. They are prime candidates to solve some of the world’s toughest problems.
One recent example is James E. Hubbard Jr., a world-class visionary who came to Texas A&M as a 2017-18 fellow of the Hagler Institute and subsequently joined A&M’s faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The July 8, 2021 issue of Texas A&M Engineering Weekly reported that the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station has received a five-year, $24 million contract from the Army Research Laboratory to support autonomous vehicle research. Srikanth Saripalli and James Hubbard are lead investigators in this project, Distributed Autonomous Robotic Experiments and Simulations. Their objective will include
developing virtual proving grounds designed to enable researchers to develop, test, and demonstrate artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms or autonomous vehicles.
Hubbard earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Researchers like Hubbard who have come to Texas A&M through the Hagler Institute have helped Texas A&M become the top research university in the state of Texas.
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Collaboration between Hagler Fellow and Texas A&M Faculty Member Has Additional Impact |
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A favorite piece of advice from a friend of our staff is, “You can’t know too much, and you can’t know too many people.” One of the seldom-recognized advantages of bringing top scholars to Texas A&M is that they get to experience first-hand the quality of A&M’s faculty and students and they have influence in their professions to convey this quality to others. These visiting scholars can help open doors that might otherwise stay closed. For example, many write recommendation letters for students who are graduating. |
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A recent example involving a member of Texas A&M’s faculty comes from Dr. Vijay Dhir, 2017-2018 fellow of the Hagler Institute, a renowned researcher in the field of heat transfer, member of the National Academy of Engineering and former Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles. During his time in the Hagler Institute, Dr. Dhir became more acquainted with the expertise of Texas A&M University Professor Debjyoti Banerjee. Dr. Dhir nominated Professor Banerjee for the Steering Committee for the Decadal Survey on Biological and Physical Sciences Research in Space 2023-2032 (“BPS”). The Space Studies Board of the National Academies of Engineering, Science, and Medicine subsequently chose Dr. Banerjee to be a member of this Steering Committee. Might the Space Studies Board have chosen Dr. Banerjee anyway, without the recommendation of Dr. Dhir? Possibly, but the fact is his appointment stemmed originally from Dr. Dhir’s recommendation, as recounted here.
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Dr. Banerjee is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M. He is a fellow for the American Society for Mechanical Engineers, the holder of 14 patents, and the recipient of awards for his research and teaching. Dr. Banerjee is the sole representative on the Steering Committee for BPS from a Texas institution.
The purpose of the Decadal Surveys is to solicit input from researchers in a particular field and formulate a community consensus about the most compelling science questions for the decade ahead. In this case, the area of study is Biological and Physical Sciences Research in Space.
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Texas A&M is influential in at least one other Decadal Survey. Dr. Robert Kennicutt Jr. joined Texas A&M’s faculty after serving as 2016-2017 fellow of the Hagler Institute. Dr. Kennicutt, now Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University and a specialist in the area of evolution of galaxies, is the lead of the 2020 Decadal Survey for astronomy and astrophysics, which will determine and prioritize the most important research in these fields for the next decade. Thanks in no small part to the Hagler Institute, Texas A&M faculty will have significant influence on the future course of research in several important fields of inquiry.
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An Engineering Collaboration Stretches the Limits of Biomedical Technology
The invention of transistor miniaturized technologies is useful in monitoring health. However, the hardness of many technologies initially made them incompatible with the human body’s morphology.
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2018-19 Hagler Fellow
Yonggang Huang
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2015-16 Hagler Fellow
John Rogers
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In a fifteen-year collaboration, John Rogers, 2015-16 fellow of the Hagler Institute and a materials scientist and engineer, and Yonggang Huang, 2018-19 fellow of the Hagler Institute and a mechanical engineer, first tailored the mechanics of electronic devices to mirror the soft, highly elastic mechanics of human skin. Highly compliant devices placed in anatomical locations with high curvatures can capture relevant health signals nearby or close to their origin and can be used to measure signals to assess a person’s health status. The possibility of mechanical integration between electronic devices and the human body has triggered the development of flexible and stretchable bio-integrated electronics technology with advanced health monitoring capabilities.
Thanks to the work by Rogers and Huang, recent years have seen the development of a wide portfolio of bio-integrated electronic devices. These devices can stretch, bend, and twist while tracking changes in temperature, oxygen levels, body orientation, and coughing frequency. An elastomeric encapsulation layer with skin-like mechanical properties protects the electronics in the device from the environment.
For wireless operation, electrical power is supplied though the air using an inductive link with a nearby power source like a cellphone. High-quality physiological signals that match or exceed the quality of those obtained with “gold-standard” techniques can be captured with bio-integrated devices as small as the Lincoln penny.
The modeling and experimental collaboration between Rogers and Huang has used fundamental scientific discoveries in mechanics and materials to design functional bio-integrated devices that can improve patient care. Sensing is only one of the capabilities achieved with bio-integrated electronics. When combined with microfluidic layouts, body fluids, like sweat, can be captured and manipulated inside the device for in-situ chemical analysis. Alternatively, flexible fluidic probes can be implanted in the brain or peripheral nerves to wirelessly deliver pharmaceutical agents for rehabilitation or stimulation.
The long-standing mechanics and materials collaboration by Rogers and Huang has enabled an individualized, patient-specific technology that can transform the way to deliver healthcare.
Both Rogers and Huang are members of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering. Rogers also is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Huang was recently elected an honorary member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Both scholars have written a number of papers with faculty at Texas A&M.
This information is a distillation of an October 28, 2021, report by Raudel Avila of Northwestern University, the academic home of Rogers and Huang.
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Harold Adams Honored by National Academy of Construction
Just when we felt confident that Harold Adams, 2014-15 fellow of the Hagler Institute, had earned all the awards potentially available to him, we received word of another. In July 2021, the National Academy of Construction (NAC) presented Adams its highest honor, the Ted C. Kennedy Award. The Academy’s accolades include the following:
"Adams, chairman emeritus of RTKL Associates, has influenced the world of architecture for more than six decades on a global scale. He has been honored by the American Institute of Architects with two of its highest recognitions: as a member of its College of Fellows and as a recipient of the Edward C. Kemper Award."
The NAC’s citation refers to Harold Adams’ achievements as
Some of the most noteworthy architectural projects ever built: the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame, the redevelopment of Lafayette Square, the US Naval Academy master plan, the rebuilding of the Pentagon after 9/11, the US Capitol Visitor Center, the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, and many more.
The General Secretary of the NAC, Wayne Crew, states
Harold Adams stands apart in the world of architecture and in the design and construction industry. His career, his leadership, and his contributions have made the world a better place for us all.
Adams is now on the permanent faculty in Texas A&M’s College of Architecture. Among other contributions, he helps evaluate the work in every department in the college to make sure that Texas A&M graduates are ready to tackle the real-world issues in the field of architecture. They could not ask for a better mentor.
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Robert Levine on the Impeachment
of Andrew Johnson
Robert Levine, Hagler Fellow in the class of 2013-14, recently extended his work on Frederick Douglass into the post-Civil War period. His latest book, The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, published by W.W. Norton in August 2021, addresses the struggle between Frederick Douglass and President Andrew Johnson in the reconstruction period following the American Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. Levine’s new book follows one of his best-known works, The Lives of Frederick Douglass, published by Harvard University Press, which provides fresh insights into Douglass’ journey as a slave to become a free man and one of the most prominent African American leaders in American history. Levine credits his time in the Hagler Institute for making significant progress on these two books, in addition to receiving valuable critiques. His latest work has garnered high praise from several sources, including the Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown:
Levine’s prose is often beautiful but even more beautiful is his reliance on the truth of history.
Levine’s many books and journal publications have rendered him an influential figure in American and African American literature for decades. He is on editorial boards of literature journals, and he is the general editor of the the Norton Anthology of American Literature, which is widely used in university courses. A professor of English and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, Levine received the prestigious Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary studies during his term as a Hagler Fellow.
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Periodically we receive notes from participants in the institute. Recently we received a note from the Miroslav Begovic, head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M, who offered these thoughts about the impact of Hagler Fellows.
The times that our faculty (especially junior faculty) spend with fellows and professional and personal bonds and relationships that they create could truly impact their entire careers. Having been lucky to work with some of the most productive fellows, we have witnessed collaborative efforts resulting in dozens of joint publications and funded National Science Foundation and other research projects. Those are highly desirable outcomes, and they are solid indicators in favor of extending to them offers of permanent employment. But the true and lasting impact of fellows is that as role models. They help create a new culture of preeminence at Texas A&M, which, when mixed with our own long tradition of excellence and homegrown success and pride, propels Texas A&M to another level of excellence and bright future.
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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
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