Newsletter Issue 25, March 2022 |
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Last year the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study had to cancel its induction gala, and uncertainty about the pandemic caused changes in our plans for 2022. I am pleased to announce, however, that the 2022 induction gala will be held on May 20, 2022. It will be a grand celebration, with the induction of two classes of fellows—the Class of 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. The gala will be held at a new venue, the Zone Club in the Kyle Field complex, appropriate for its first-decade celebration.
The Institute’s first ten years have proven as productive as my fondest hopes. Many collectively contribute to the university’s advancement in quality. The Hagler Institute is only one of many organic parts of Texas A&M, but it occupies a unique position. It alone is devoted to bringing the worlds’ top scholars and visionaries to all colleges and schools of Texas A&M. By doing this, the Institute brings an annual injection of talent, fertilization of new ideas, and the inspiration of excellence. Since each fellow is a national academy member or holds equivalent stature in his or her chosen field, the presence of these fellows makes it more attractive for other academy members to come to the A&M campus. The Hagler Fellows contribute to increased A&M research funds, excellence in scholarship, and expanded visibility—some even join A&M’s faculty after their term has ended in the Hagler Institute.
Texas A&M has recently made tremendous strides in research sponsorship and various traditional rankings nationally. The university’s ambition to be a consensus top ten public university hinges on one important issue: the quality and national reputation of our faculty, including the number of faculty in the key national academies of medicine, engineering, and science. In addition, we should achieve comparable stature across all colleges and schools. In this newsletter, I will share some of the latest information about A&M’s national standings with regard to external research expenditures and the national academy membership of its faculty.
I look forward to seeing many of you at our 10-year gala celebration on May 20. In the meantime, I wish you a healthy and prosperous spring.
Best Wishes,
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National Academy Members:
A Comparison
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To evaluate Texas A&M’s progress in attracting academy-level membership, we can compare the number of national academy members at Texas A&M with other top-ranked peer institutions. The following table of high-ranked public and private universities, including Texas A&M, shows current faculty membership in the national academies of medicine, engineering, and sciences.
The numbers of academy members are those officially listed in academy rosters as having a Texas A&M University affiliation. Twelve Hagler Fellows have joined our faculty, six of them full time. Simply put, counting those listed on the national academy rosters underestimate the academy-level presence on the A&M campus. We have academy members with a 50 percent faculty affiliation with Texas A&M whose official affiliation on academy membership rolls is listed with another university. Some of these are professors who joined A&M’s faculty half-time after first coming to A&M through the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. Such is the case with William G. Unruh, Roger Howe, Robert Kennicutt, Jr., and Leif Andersson, among others. All of these scholars have made significant contributions with their half-time presence on the A&M campus. Of course, the other 76 academy level scholars that the Hagler Institute brought to A&M as fellows are not counted in the academy rosters as affiliated with A&M. Among Hagler Fellows who joined our faculty full-time are Alan Needleman, Robert Skelton, James E. Hubbard, Jr., Edwin L. "Ned" Thomas, and the late Christodolous Floudas. Others at the top of their profession, such as Harold Adams, who joined the faculty of architecture full-time, have made tremendous contributions, but are not listed in one of three congressionally mandated academies.
As one can see in the table below, the highest numbers of national academy members are at three private institutions, the California Institute for Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. Their numbers drive up the average number of academy members in the list of selected institutions. If data from these institutions are excluded, averages are as follows: 30 National Academy of Engineering (NAE) members, 17 National Academy of Medicine (NAM) members, and 34 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) members. These membership statistics tell a story that, with the exclusion of the top three private institutions, Texas A&M is above average for the number of NAE memberships, but below average for NAM and NAS memberships, as well as the total number of academy members.
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Texas A&M is clearly on a trajectory to be recognized as a top-ten institution in terms of national academy-level faculty. Our total academy members already match the number at the University of California at Davis and exceed those at Georgia Tech, Purdue, and the University of Texas at Austin. Our academy membership has nearly quadrupled, from 13 to 48, over the last decade.
Our NAE membership now compares favorably with all public universities except the University of California-Berkeley. With regard to NAS, we are low by about a factor of three and NAM by a factor of four.
Our low NAM membership may be more easily addressed because the average for top-rated schools is smaller. Adding ten NAM members would make Texas A&M above or competitive with all peers except those with major medical research arms (green shaded rows in the table).
NAS membership might be a point of emphasis going forward, and the proposed new College of Arts and Sciences will most likely aggressively recruit their Hagler Fellows. The College of Science has been very successful in attracting Hagler Fellows but has not recruited many of these stars as permanent faculty. This pattern is likely to change going forward.
Likewise, the health sciences have not been strong participants in nominating Hagler Fellows and this trend also seems likely to change. Adding to NAS and NAM membership is an opportunity for Texas A&M to compete more effectively with the set of peer institutions presented in the table.
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Texas A&M Surges Ahead
in Research Funding
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Texas A&M ranks number 10 among public institutions, and our expenditures jumped 22% in one year. Texas A&M is the only major university in Texas in the top 10. The next ranking university in Texas is the University of Texas at Austin, ranked 34 among all universities and number 23 among public universities, with $797,199 in research expenditures.
Other notable recent rankings are:
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Washington Monthly rated Texas A&M number 21 among the nation’s top 30 universities and 14th overall among public universities. Their ratings focus on liberal arts colleges, four-year institutions, that award bachelor’s degrees and that focus on arts and sciences rather than professional programs, based on their contribution to the public good in the categories of social mobility, research, and promoting public service.
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Forbes magazine ranked Texas A&M University number 17 among public universities in its September 9, 2021 issue. Forbes ranked 600 four-year schools that most of America’s college students attend. Their ranking criteria focused on graduation rates, student debt, return on investment, alumni data, and other factors.
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In September 2021, the US News and World Report ranked 1,400 schools in what it describes as 17 measures of academic quality, among them the number of academic majors offered, tuition, financial aid, graduation rates, student body demographics, and other factors. The Report ranked Texas A&M University tied for number 26 among public universities and tied for number 68 among all universities. The same report ranked Texas A&M at number 15 in the nation for the best undergraduate engineering program, and A&M tied at number 23 for the best undergraduate business programs.
Clearly, different rankings look at different measurements. Nevertheless, in every instance Texas A&M fares well against other universities and, at best, is in the top 10 or top 20 rankings among public universities. With a nearly 400 percent growth in academy membership over the past decade and a 22 percent growth in research expenditures in one year, it is clear that Texas A&M’s trajectory is upward. The Hagler Institute will do what it can to further elevate Texas A&M’s national stature.
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James E. Hubbard, Jr. Elected to the
National Academy of Inventors
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The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) recently named Texas A&M professor James E. Hubbard, Jr. as a new fellow of NAI, and he will be officially inducted in June in Phoenix along with another A&M engineering professor, Gerard Coté. The two are among the 164 new members of the 2021 class of NAI Fellows.
James, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, was first attracted to Texas A&M as a fellow of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. He came from the University of Maryland and is renowned as a pioneer in the development of unmanned vehicles, as well as aeroacoustics. He subsequently joined Texas A&M’s faculty and holds the prestigious Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. ’45 Chair I Professor in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering. Hubbard is the director of StarLab, a state-of-the-art motion-capture research space well-suited for testing and developing new methods and technologies.
Coté and Hubbard join 14 Texas A&M faculty members who have been selected as NAI Fellows.
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Henry Rousso and the D.C. Program |
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Henry Rousso, a 2019-2020 fellow of the Hagler Institute, came to the Institute from the French National Center for Scientific Research but was subsequently appointed president of development of the new French Memorial and Museum on Terrorism. In April he will attend a conference on terrorism that he has organized in Washington, D.C. This conference will be attended by many subject matter experts, as well as the French Ambassador to the United States. It will be held in the context of the French and European Day for the victims of terrorism, which is commemorated on March 11.
The conference will be co-sponsored by the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, and the French Embassy. During the conference, Rousso will present his final report for the French Memorial and Museum on Terrorism and provide an opportunity for an exchange of ideas with U.S. colleagues. Dr. Rousso will come to the Texas A&M campus for the remainder of April to organize several roundtable discussions on terrorism, the French museum on terrorism, and issues in the French presidential election. You can learn about the museum on terrorism, which plans to open its doors in 2027, at https://musee-memorial-terrorisme.fr.
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Princeton University Honors H. Vincent Poor |
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In February 2022, Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences featured an article summarizing the career and research contributions of H. Vincent (Vince) Poor, 2018-2019 fellow of the Hagler Institute and holder of the Michael Henry Strater chair at Princeton University. What a career it is!
His research has been path-breaking for digital and wireless communications, including the use of multiple antennas on wireless devices. He has made significant contributions to smart grid power systems and even in the outlook for the spread and mitigation measures of COVID-19 and its variants.
Poor’s publications have been cited more than 100,000 times. His contributions have earned him induction into the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and the U.K. Royal Society, foreign member.
Poor and his team have worked on physical layer security, an alternative to encryption, which utilizes some physical properties of wireless communications channels. He has contributed to aspects of wireless bandwidth critical to the growth of 5G networks.
Besides the wide-ranging impact of his research, he has mentored more than 100 graduate students and post-docs, and in 2019 he received the Benjamin Garver Lamme Award from the American Society for Engineering Education. He is also the recipient of the Outstanding Mentorship Award from Women in Communications Engineering, a component of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
While accomplishing all of this, Poor handled administrative duties as Princeton’s dean of engineering for 12 years, and, for a time, his course about the wireless revolution was the most popular undergraduate course at Princeton.
Originally from Alabama, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Auburn University and a Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University. He will return soon to Texas A&M to collaborate with faculty and students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
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Hagler Fellows Active at Texas A&M |
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As we move back to a normal routine post-pandemic, it is a pleasure to see fellows returning to campus after their visits have been delayed. Several are currently on campus. R. Graham Cooks, 2020-2021 fellow, recently visited the offices of the Hagler Institute, taking a break from his work in the Department of Chemistry.
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Stefan H.E. Kaufmann, a fellow in the class of 2018-2019, and no stranger to this newsletter has been on campus since early January. He reports that he and his colleagues at Texas A&M, Baylor College of Medicine, and elsewhere, have published their research, titled “Gene expression signatures identify biologically and clinically distinct tuberculosis endotypes,” in the European Respiratory Journal. Kaufman, one of the most-cited scientists in the world, comes to Texas A&M from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, Germany.
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Hagler Hero:
R. Bowen Loftin
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R. Bowen Loftin ‘70 has known about and appreciated the Institute for Advanced Study since its outset. When Loftin was the 24th president of Texas A&M (February 2010-January 2014), the Institute for Advanced Study was in its formative stages. He provided $400,000 in annual funds from earnings on the Heep Foundation endowment to the Institute to fund graduate student fellowships, and he also provided the Institute with $3 million in matching money from the Heep Foundation’s accumulated earnings. When combined with Chancellor John Sharp’s $5.2 million investment in the Institute, these funds were instrumental in launching the Institute from an idea into a reality. All subsequent presidents, including President M. Katherine Banks, have approved the continuation of the $400,000 annual funding for graduate student fellowships.
When Loftin decided to make a planned gift to the Hagler Institute, a meeting was arranged. At that time, Loftin wanted to provide $400,000, to be matched by the Hagler Institute, to fund students in the Bush School of Government and Public Service to work with fellows of the Hagler Institute.
It was suggested that this was not optimal funding for the Bush School because funding for fellows was a more pressing need. Consequently, Junkins proposed to Loftin that he raise his contribution to $500,000, to be matched by the Hagler Institute, for an endowment in the Bush School devoted to funding Hagler Fellows. That idea appealed to Loftin, and that plan was implemented.
For his early contributions to the Hagler Institute and for his provision of an endowment in the Bush School of Government and Public Service devoted to funding Hagler Fellows, Dr. R. Bowen Loftin is hereby named a Hagler Hero.
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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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