Global Research Partnership Centers
2008 Winner Profiles
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas
From humble beginnings in 1876 as Texas’ first public institution of higher learning, to a bustling 5,000-acre campus with 46,000-plus students and a nationally recognized faculty, Texas A&M University is one of a select few universities with land-grant, sea-grant and space-grant designations. Texas A&M has two branch campuses, one in Galveston, Texas, and another in Qatar. The research-intensive flagship university with 10 colleges was recently ranked first in the nation by The Washington Monthly for “tangible contributions to the public interest.” U.S. News and World Report ranked Texas A&M third nationally as a “best value” among public universities. Many of the university’s degree programs are ranked among the top 10 in the country.
View Texas A&M's presentation at the GRP Symposium
Dr. Raymond J. Carroll
Dr. Raymond J. Carroll is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University, where he is the current Director of the Texas A&M Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science. He is the Principal Investigator at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and was recently given a NCI MERIT Award, the first statistician to be so honored. He has served as editor of Biometrics, the journal of the International Biometric Society, and as editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (Theory and Methods). He gave the Fisher Lecture at the 2002 Joint Statistical Meetings, an award given by the major statistical societies in honor of a senior statistician whose research has "influenced the theory and practice of statistics". Dr. Carroll is one of the leading figures in the analysis of gene-environment interactions, and wrote the authoritative text on modern statistical analysis of data when exposure measurements are subject to uncertainties.
KAUST Center Award: Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (IAMCS)
Texas A&M University and its partners, the University of Utah and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in collaboration with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, will create the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (IAMCS). Computational science has emerged as a third paradigm for scientific research, joining the established approaches of analysis and laboratory experimentation. IAMCS will utilize this emerging paradigm to support transformative research conducted by multidisciplinary teams of mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists. Theoretical advances will be applied to problems of significance to Saudi Arabia and the world through thematic, applications-related research. IAMCS will create a synergistic research intersection of three distinct disciplines, each approaching similar problems from different perspectives. Integration of these perspectives will allow applications-related problems to benefit from theoretical advances tied to model development and predictive assessment, flexible models, and problems with either excessive or sparse data.
The Institute has three research cores:
- Forward Multiscale Modeling and Simulation;
- Deterministic and Statistical Methods in Inverse Problems; and
- Data-Driven Computational Science and Visualization.
Annual applications-related research themes will serve as research integrators required for the needed synergy to transform discrete research cores into a unified Center. Year 1 and 2 themes are Computational Earth Sciences and Computational Materials Science and Engineering. Through its research cores and annual themes, IAMCS will ignite creative interactions with these component parts and KAUST, generating new knowledge in critical areas and better preparing the next generation of researchers.
The IAMCS research environment will be significantly enhanced by the global context informed by KAUST laboratories and its thematic research areas. Institute goals will be accomplished via cyber-enabled tutorials, rotating workshops and symposia, joint seminars, and student/faculty exchanges. Finally, IAMCS will develop a high-performance computing environment to be mirrored at KAUST, along with a grid computing infrastructure to support computational solutions to large-scale problems.
The critical problems IAMCS will address require a novel partnership of distinct disciplines. The transformative outcome will be the integration of traditional disciplines into a collaborative research domain that promotes robust theoretical and applications-related approaches. IAMCS will transcend traditional academic boundaries and create new disciplinary approaches to significant problems, primarily those requiring advanced computational technologies and visualization tools. Existing collaborations between IAMCS researchers and industry will be leveraged through activities of the External Advisory Board. Private-sector partners, such as Exxon Mobil Upstream Research Company and Quantum Reservoir Impact, will interact with the Center's research programs through ongoing dialog and research collaboration.