Bush Excellence Awards Presented To 3 Texas A&M Faculty

The 2016 Bush Excellence Awards have been presented to three Texas A&M faculty members – Dr. Christian Brannstrom for teaching, Dr. Valerie Hudson for international research and Dr. Bradford Clement for public service – at a luncheon hosted by the university and the Texas A&M International Advisory Board.

Each recipient was presented a plaque and a check for $2,000 by Gary W. Booth, chief financial officer of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

The Bush Excellence Awards were established through the vision and support of President and Mrs. George Bush in 2002, with financial assistance from the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation. Since that time, 39 awards have been presented to Texas A&M faculty.

Brannstrom is a professor in the Department of Geography and director of Environmental Programs in the College of Geosciences. Since 2005, he has used his fluency in both Portuguese and Spanish and his knowledge of the Latin American countries of Brazil, Costa Rica and Nicaragua to lead study abroad for Texas A&M students. He has also worked to build bridges between Texas A&M students and students from other countries by bringing foreign graduate students into his program. His students say his great sense of humor and desire for them to be passionate about research make a difference. Brannstrom’s ability to lighten the stressful and challenging realities of both graduate and undergraduate education are unique characteristics that his students say make him deserving of the award.

In addition to his international teaching excellence to students is his work with faculty both here and abroad through publishing academic articles on the pedagogy of study abroad in both English and Portuguese. Brannstrom’s work with colleagues to analyze why student performance increases after a short-term study abroad experience was published in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education in 2011. In 2013 Dr. Brannstrom received The Association of Former Students 2013 Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching.

Hudson is a professor of international affairs and holder of the George H.W. Bush Chair in the Bush School of Government and Public Service. She has a distinguished record in international research. She is best known for her path-breaking work on the relationship between gender and security. She argues that the status of women in domestic society has profound impacts on the foreign policies of the countries in which they live and the general security situation both domestically and internationally.

Hudson has four published books and has authored more than 30 scholarly articles, in addition to occasional articles in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy and Politico and in academic journals such as American Political Science Review, International Security and Political Psychology, as well as in military journals. She is also called upon by the mainstream media to address issues relating to her research. She developed the largest and most sophisticated compilation of data in the world on issues of women and security. The WomanStats project is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Defense and a three-year Minerva grant. This database has become the go-to source for those wishing to study the linkage between the situation and security of women and that of their nations.

Her work on issues of women and security was recognized by the Carnegie Corporation of New York which named her an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in the inaugural class of 2015. She has also been awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award by a Foreign Policy Analysis Section of the International Studies Association and is listed as one of the top 100 Most Influential Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine.

Clement is a professor of geology and geophysics and director of the International Ocean Discovery Program in the College of Geosciences. He has spent the last 32 years of his career serving the scientific ocean drilling community since its inception at Texas A&M in 1984. He first served as a staff scientist for Ocean Drilling programs and later the international community as an associate program director of the program in the Ocean Sciences division at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. In 2009, he was lured back to Texas A&M to take the lead in the International Ocean Discovery Program better known as simply IODP. IODP is the University’s largest single research program and the largest ongoing earth sciences program in the world.

As director of IODP, Clement’s impact on translating cutting-edge geosciences research to direct applications that benefit the public is both broad and deep. Through his leadership, his long-standing scientific and administrative contributions to the international scientific ocean drilling community, Clement has facilitated profound scientific discoveries that have transformed the public’s understanding of diverse topics spanning earthquake and tsunami hazards, global climate history, the limits of life in extreme environments on this planet and the cycling of water through the earth’s interior, among dozens of other intriguing topics relating directly to the world of our past, present and future. Bringing the story of IODP and the JOIDES Resolution back to the classrooms, communities and media through daily blogs and Internet connections, he is inspiring all, but especially students, to think about STEM through the lens of the ocean and seafloor.