Symposium for Faculty, Staff, Graduate Students and PostDocs in the Sciences: Insight and Strategies for Professional Success, Personal Well Being and Getting Along with Others

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Sessions and speakers in each session: Agenda Speaker Bios: Meigan Aronson, Ph.D Meigan Aronson became the 10th Dean of Science at Texas A&M University on October 1, 2015. In addition to a primary academic appointment as a professor of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Her research expertise is in experimental condensed matter physics. Prior to coming to Texas A&M, Aronson had jointly served since 2007 as a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University in New York and a physicist in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she was group leader of correlated electron materials in the Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department. She has since moved her laboratory to Texas A&M, where her research continues to focus on the discovery and characterization of quantum materials with particular interest in uncovering new superconductors. Aronson earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Bryn Mawr College in 1980 and both a master's (1982) and Ph.D. (1988) in physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After completing postdoctoral work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, she became an assistant professor of physics at the University of Michigan in 1990, earning promotion to full professor in 2002. In addition, Aronson served as associate dean for natural sciences in the College of Literature, Science and Arts at Michigan from 2004 to 2007. A Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2001, Aronson also is a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow (2010-2015), a General Electric Junior Faculty Fellow (1992-1993) and a Committee on Institutional Cooperation Academic Leadership Fellow (2003-2004). Among her many professional activities, she is the current chair of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Neutron Advisory Board and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory External Advisory Committee and is a member of the Board of Governors for the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) at the University of California and the Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences. In addition, Aronson has been a member of several advisory committees for the National Academy Board on Physics and Astronomy, including the Committees on Opportunities in High Magnetic Field Science and the Future Direction of High Magnetic Field Science. She also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jennifer Bradford Jennifer Bradford began working at Texas A&M University as the Graduate Program Coordinator for the Department of Biology in 2014. She loves helping students on their academic journey, whether it be teaching, advising, or mentoring. She graduated from Texas Tech University in 2005 with two bachelor’s degrees in English and French Literature and Language. She earned her master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury, U.K in 2006. Prior to working at A&M, Jennifer worked at several community colleges as an adjunct instructor. She taught classes in English composition, literature, and developmental writing. . Ginger Carney, Ph.D Ginger E. Carney joined the Department of Biology at Texas A&M University in 2004 and was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2009. She obtained her Ph.D. in Genetics at the University of Georgia in 1998, under the guidance of Dr. Michael Bender. Her postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Barbara J. Taylor at Oregon State University focused on molecular genetic studies of neural factors controlling reproductive behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster. Her current research focuses on determining the genetic and physiological mechanisms that regulate animal behaviors. Dr. Carney teaches Critical Writing in Biology at the undergraduate level and Behavior, Genes, and Evolution at the graduate level. She was appointed Associate Dean for Undergraduate Research and College Climate in 2013 and 2014, respectively, and is currently Associate Dean for Assessment and College Climate. Dr. Carney is a member of the Interdisciplinary Faculty of Neuroscience, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Genetics and has won numerous awards, including the Women’s Faculty Network Outstanding Service and Leadership Award, the College of Science and Association of Former Students Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Center for Teaching Excellence 25th Anniversary W Course Teaching Award. She was named an SEC Academic Leadership Development Program (SEC-ALDP) Fellow for 2015-2016. Dr. Carney serves on grant review panels for the NSF and NIH and also serves as an ad hoc reviewer for NSF, NIH and numerous journals, including Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, PLoS Biology, J. Insect Physiol., Evolution and Proc. R. Soc. Alan Dabney, Ph.D Alan Dabney is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics, having been a tenure-track member of the department since 2006. Dr. Dabney received his Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Washington in 2006. Dr. Dabney has over 20 peer-reviewed publications, mostly in the area of bioinformatics. In addition, he was featured in a series of 36 video lectures by the W.H. Freeman publishing company in 2010, and he co-authored the Cartoon Introduction to Statistics in 2013. Dr. Dabney has received three teaching awards from Texas A&M (the Montague-Center for Teaching Excellence Teaching Scholar award in 2009, the Distinguished Achievement College-Level Award in Teaching from the Association of Former Students in 2011, and the 2016-2019 Eppright Professorship in Undergraduate Teaching Excellence). Dr. Dabney was instrumental in the development of the new bachelor of science degree in statistics in 2016. Dr. Dabney is also active in promoting diversity and inclusion on campus. In 2016, he delivered a seminar series titled Rational Learning that combined probability, scientific inquiry, philosophy and common sense to argue for an inclusive, compassionate worldview; he plans to teach a special topics class through the College of Liberal Arts on this topic in fall 2017. Debra Fowler, Ph.D Debra Fowler is the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and serves as the lead innovator in faculty professional development as well as curriculum and organizational change at Texas A&M University for the past twelve years. Under Dr. Fowler’s leadership, the Center has supported major curriculum changes in a variety of disciplines, to include the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Ecosystem Science & Management, Geoscience and Geophysics, Civil Engineering, and Architectural Engineering at Texas A&M. She has established the Center as the professional experts for the educational component on various grants. Dr. Fowler is the current Co-PI on the NRT-DESE: Data-Enabled Discovery and Design of Energy Materials (D3EM), $3,000,000, NSF-NRT, TEES-Texas A&M University, 2015-2020. Dr. Fowler’s research interests include interdisciplinary teaching and learning, curriculum and program (re)design, and organizational change and innovation. She is the author of the Program (Re)Design Model. Dr. Fowler has taught undergraduate and graduate students at both Georgia Institute of Technology and Texas A&M University. She has served as a Visiting Assistant Professor teaching graduate students in the Department of Education Administration and Human Resource Development and is currently a graduate faculty member in the Department of Educational Psychology. Dr. Fowler has served in leadership roles on national and state faculty development organizations and presented internationally in curriculum program (re)design, reflection, integrative ePortfolios, and college teaching. François Gabbaï, Ph.D François Gabbaï is a native of France where he was born in the late 60’s. Before joining the research group of Alan Cowley at the University of Texas at Austin, he studied chemistry at the Université de Bordeaux. In 1992 and 1993, he fulfilled his French National Duties by taking part in a Franco-American cooperation with Guy Bertrand as the French advisor. After completing his Ph.D. degree in 1994, he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship as well as Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Commission which allowed him to work with Hubert Schmidbaur at the Technische Universität München (Germany) as a postdoctoral fellow and later as an “Habilitand”. Upon completion of his habilitation work in 1998, he joined Texas A&M University where he now holds the Arthur E. Martell Chair of Chemistry. He is a member of the advisory board of several international journals and has served as an Associate Editor for Organometallics since 2011. He is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the recipient of the 2009 North American Dalton Lectureship. He was also recently recognized with the 2016 ACS F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry. His research interests revolve around the chemistry of p-block and late transition metal elements with applications in the domain of materials chemistry, molecular recognition and catalysis. He has published over 200 original papers. Irina Gaynanova, Ph.D Irina Gaynanova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University since July 2015. She received a Diploma with honors (M.S. equivalent) in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, in 2009; MS in Statistics from Cornell University in 2013; and PhD in Statistics from Cornell University in 2015. Irina’s current research interests include analysis of high-dimensional data, multivariate analysis, statistical methods for analyzing biological data and machine learning. Christian Hilty, Ph.D Christian Hilty obtained a diploma in Physics from ETH Zurich in 1999. He received his degree of Dr. sc. from the same institution in 2004, based on work in the area of NMR spectroscopy applied to protein structure determination. Subsequently, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he performed postdoctoral research focusing on the use of hyperpolarized xenon in NMR and MRI. In 2006, he joined Texas A&M University as an Assistant Professor, and currently holds the position of Professor. His present research interests are in the development and application of hyperpolarization methods for high-resolution NMR spectroscopy in chemistry and biochemistry. Valen Johnson, Ph.D Valen E. Johnson received his Ph.D. in statistics from The University of Chicago in 1989 and is a Distinguished Professor and Department Head of Statistics at Texas A&M University. His applied research interests include educational assessment, ordinal data and rank data analysis, clinical trial design, image analysis, and reliability analysis. His current methodological interests focus on Bayesian hypothesis testing and its connections to classical testing procedures, Bayesian variable selection, Markov chain Monte Carlo model diagnostics, and latent variable modeling. Paulo Lima_Filho, Ph.D A native of Brazil, Lima-Filho serves as Associate Dean for International Programs in the College of Science and as Associate Head of Operations and Undergraduate Programs in the Department of Mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at Stony Brook University in 1989, then came to Texas A&M University in 1993 following postdoctoral appointments at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Chicago. As Associate Dean, he oversees international operations, including facilitating agreements between the college and foreign institutions, coordinating dual-degree program development, and spearheading educational initiatives and global learning opportunities for students and faculty. In Mathematics, he directs undergraduate programs and coordinates the largest teaching service operation at Texas A&M. His research interests include algebraic geometry, topology and interactive instructional applications. Xiaorong Lin, Ph.D I’m currently an associate professor at the Biology department in the College of Sciences. I started my own independent scientific career as an assistant professor at Texas A&M in 2008. I was trained as a chemical engineer and then switched to biology for my PhD degree specializing in medical mycology. Besides my teaching and research activities, I devote a lot of my time to serve this scientific community. I serve on the editorial board of the journal “PLoS Pathogens” and “Fungal Genetics and Biology”. I also serve on the scientific advisory board for Human Fungal Pathogens. I am a panel member for the NIH study section “AIDS-Associated Opportunistic Infections”. In addition, I serve as a course co-director for the Molecular Mycology Summer Workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). Michael Longnecker, Ph.D Faculty member in Department of Statistics since 1977 Associate Department Head since 2000 Author/Co-author of over 60 articles in refereed journals Chair/Member of over 150 statistics Ph.D. and M.S. committees Member of over 350 non-statistics M.S. and Ph.D. committees Taught 17 different graduate courses and 7 different undergraduate courses Received University and College of Science AFS Teaching Awards in 1982, 1994 Awarded 2011 National Statistics Education Award from Mu Sigma Rho Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association Elected member of the International Statistical Institute Received Western Michigan University Distinguished Alumni Award Co-author of textbook on statistical methods adopted by nearly 100 universities Peter McIntyre, Ph.D Peter McIntyre has a 40-year career in high-energy physics, accelerator physics and technology, and superconductor materials science. Prof. McIntyre was the first to propose how to use beam cooling to coalesce intense beams of antiprotons and make proton-antiproton colliding beams in the existing synchrotrons. That work led to the discovery of the weak bosons W and Z, later the top quark. Peter pioneered the technology of superferric magnets, which led to magnets for an electron ion collider for nuclear research and an ultimate energy hadron Collider-in-the-Sea. Prof. McIntyre delights in developing applications of the physics and technology of particle accelerators for practical applications. His projects span from a walk-through MR breast imager that can detect early stage breast cancer, to a thermal management technology that can make concentrated solar power competitive with fossil-fuel electric power, to a method for accelerator-driven fission power that can destroy the dangerous transuranic elements in spent nuclear fuel. Peter earned all his degrees at the University of Chicago. Viewed through a different lens, Peter and his wife Becky have been married for nearly 50 years, and their four children are pursuing diverse careers a professor of environmental biology in Wisconsin, a metal artist in Austin, a third-grade teacher north of Dallas, and an animal-care worker in Pensacola. Prof. McIntyre was recently selected to serve as Head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, which requires that he endeavor to serve the needs and protect the interests of a remarkable spectrum of faculty, students, and staff in his Department. That has been a learning experience, with plenty of oops moments and some gratifying successes very much a work in progress. Thomas McKnight, Ph.D Thomas D. McKnight, professor and head of the Department of Biology, is a plant molecular biologist who earned a B.S. in microbiology and a Ph.D. in molecular and population genetics from the University of Georgia. He did postdoctoral work at Atlantic Richfield’s Plant Cell Research Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Texas A&M University in 1985. He has taught a variety of courses from freshman biology through specialized graduate classes. Before becoming department head in 2014, he served as associate department head for 10 years. His laboratory uses comparative transcriptomics and genomics to study biochemical pathways in plants. Simon W. North, Ph.D Simon W. North is currently a Professor and the Head of the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. He is the Co-Director of the National Aerothermochemistry Laboratory and the Associate Director of the Center for Atmospheric Chemistry and the Environment. His research program focuses on the study of molecular reaction dynamics, chemical kinetics, laser-based diagnostics development, and flow visualization. His work has been funded by the NSF, AFOSR, EPA, and NASA. He has authored or co-authored (primarily with his students) over 110 articles on both research and chemical education in peer reviewed journals. Over the past 15 years he has been involved in numerous outreach activities, NSF-sponsored STEM educational projects, and teaching at all levels which has resulted in recognition including the University Level Distinguished Achievement Award. Kim Ritchie Kim Ritchie is the Director of Operations for the Online Statistics and Analytics Programs. She has been with the Department of Statistics for 11 years. Kim received her BS from Texas A&M University in Electronics Engineering Technology in 1997. Prior to her current position, she worked for two years as a software developer for the ALERT Program at Texas A&M and then for five years as a Software Engineer at Wacom Technologies in Vancouver, Washington. Kim is married and has two sons, ages 13 and 16. Between both boys, Kim is a basketball, baseball, football, marching band, scout, and theater mom. She also teaches weekly for her church’s youth program. She is on the panel for Balancing Work and Life. Anne Shiu, Ph.D Anne Shiu is an assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, arrived in Fall 2014. She received a Ph.D. in 2010 in Mathematics with designated emphasis in genomic and computational biology from the University of California Berkeley. Anne was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University and then University of Chicago. Subsequently, in 2014, she began as an assistant professor in the math department at Texas A&M University. Her research interests encompass algebraic, geometric, and combinatorial approaches to mathematical biology. Emil Straube, Ph.D Emil Straube is Head of the Department of Mathematics. He received his Ph. D. in 1983 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He came to Texas A&M in 1987, becoming Professor in 1996, and department head in 2011. His research is at the interface of Partial Differential Equations and Complex Analysis in Several Variables. His awards include a 1998 AFS Distinguished Achievement Award in Research, the 1995 Bergman Prize of the American Mathematical Society (jointly with his colleague Harold Boas), and in 2013, Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Lisa Tauferner, Owner & Practitioner, Brazos Healing Center Lisa Tauferner is a certified Hatha and Kundalini Yoga instructor and Reiki Master specializing in therapeutic application of yoga postures, breathwork and meditation. She has taught yoga and meditation since 2001 and includes various other holistic healing techniques through her business, Brazos Healing Center. Brazos Healing Center was established in 2009 to provide the Brazos Valley and surrounding areas integrative healing services to maintain health and wellness through complementary and alternative medical therapies. Kim-Vy Tran, Ph.D Kim-Vy Tran's research focuses on how galaxies form and evolve. To study the properties of galaxies over cosmic time, Dr. Tran combines observations from space-based facilities such as the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope with observations from ground-based facilities such as the Magellan (Chile) and the Keck (Hawaii) telescopes. She and her research team connect observations of galaxies in the distant universe to understand how galaxies like our own Milky Way formed. Sherry J. Yennello, Ph.D Sherry Yennello, Regents Professor of Chemistry, Director of the Cyclotron Institute, Associate Dean in the College of Science and holder of the Bright Chair in Nuclear Science at Texas A&M University is an internationally renowned nuclear chemist, University Faculty Fellow and member of Texas A&M’s world-class Cyclotron Institute. Yennello joined the Texas A&M faculty in 1993 after serving as a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University (1991-92) and earning her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1990. Her research on the nuclear equation-of-state impacts such fundamental questions as, “What is the origin of the elements?” and “How are neutron-rich and heavy nuclei synthesized in the core of a star during stellar evolution?” In addition, her pioneering example as an instructor, research scientist, administrator, and mentor to faculty and students particularly women and minorities is equally respected at Texas A&M and in national and international professional circles. Yennello served as principal investigator for six major National Science Foundation grants including Texas A&M’s $3.7 million ADVANCE Center for Women Faculty established in October 2010 totaling more than $6.8 million in funding to benefit STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education and outreach., She was architect and co-chair of an NSF-funded Gender Equity Conversation effort. In addition her research has been funded by over $10.6 million throughout her career. A fellow of the American Chemical Society (2011), the American Physical Society (2005), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2013). Yennello’s many awards include the ACS’s Francis P. Garvan-John M. Olin Medal (2011), the Texas A&M Women’s Faculty Network Outstanding Mentor Award (2010), the Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching at both the university and college levels (2012 and 2008, respectively), the Sigma Xi National Young Investigator Award (2000), the NSF Young Investigator Award (1994), the Oak Ridge Junior Faculty Enhancement Award (1993) and the General Electric Faculty for the Future Award (1993).