Winners Of President’s Excellence Fund Celebrated At Research Symposium

Texas A&M University held its first President’s Excellence Fund Symposium on Thursday to showcase research, award faculty for numerous prestigious grants and to highlight efforts in transformational learning and its commitment to three pillars:  advancing transformational learning; enhancing discovery and innovation; and expanding impact on our community, state, nation, and world.

The event, a major focus for President Michael K. Young, was held in the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center and participants presented various research projects that were finalists for $10 million in scholarly funding.

“The quality of these projects has been amazing,” Young said via a video message since he was unable to attend the symposium. “We have committed $100 million over a 10-year period to reward faculty for outstanding research, and the response has been overwhelming. It has been an eye-opening experience and will advance our goals of transformational learning at Texas A&M.”

The grants are comprised of two main components. One is X-Grants, which provide $7 million in funding to faculty researchers to stimulate and support innovative interdisciplinary research and are open to all faculty, researchers and staff at Texas A&M, Texas A&M-Galveston, Texas A&M-Qatar, TEES, TEEX, AgriLife Research, AgriLife Extension and TTI.

The second component is known as T-3 grants and have $3 million in funding for teams of three faculty (called Triads) to develop long-term research and scholarship collaborations.  Each year $3 million will be available to fund up to 100 Triads at $30,000 each.

“When I came here, this project was just getting off the ground,” said Mark Barteau, vice president for research.

“It is so exciting to see how it has developed and how so many faculty are enjoying the collaborative projects in a way that has never been done at Texas A&M before.

“This is a substantial investment by Texas A&M on research, and these projects are examining some of the world’s biggest challenges. We are proving again that Aggies lead.”

Keynote speaker Cecilia Conrad, managing director of the MacArthur Foundation which awards large grants awarding creative thinking, said the awards “are sometimes called ‘Genius Grants.’ We don’t refer to them that way because creativity is so much broader than that.

“Our youngest recipient was 19 years old, and our oldest was 86,” she said of the MacArthur grants, which total $625,000 over a five-year period.  “They are known for having ‘no strings attached,’ meaning the recipient can do whatever or she wants to with the money.  The awards raise attention to their work, and we have found that they have a way of inspiring the public.”

Conrad said the foundation has embarked on another attention-grabbing project called “100 and Change.” It will award $100 million to a single research project, and in its words, “to solve a problem, take a big slice of a problem, or unlock the resources required to solve a problem.”