Two Texas A&M University professors have been appointed to endowed chairs within the College of Arts and Sciences, effective Sept. 1, 2023, announced Dr. Mark J. Zoran, interim dean of Texas A&M Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Alison R. Fout has been appointed to the C.J. Davidson Chair in Science, established in 1981 through a bequest from Mr. C.J. Davidson and the C.J. Davidson Family Charitable Foundation to support world-class bioorganic chemists and biosynthetic chemistry research at Texas A&M. Fout joins fellow chemistry professors Dr. Sarbajit Banerjee (2017), Dr. Marcetta Y. Darensbourg (2017), Dr. Michael Hall (2004) and Dr. Daniel Singleton (2005) as current holders of the Davidson Chair.
Dr. Valen E. Johnson has been appointed to the George P. Mitchell ’40 Endowed Chair in Statistics, established in 2006 by Mitchell, Texas A&M Class of 1940 and a distinguished petroleum engineering graduate, for the specific purpose of supporting Texas A&M Emeritus Professor of Statistics and Dean Emeritus of Science Dr. H. Joseph Newton in his efforts to advance programs within the former College of Science for the duration of his tenure as dean and, subsequently, faculty and related programs within the Department of Statistics.
“An endowed chair is one the most impactful ways an academic institution promotes the professional success of its faculty," said Zoran, a professor in the Department of Biology and an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Biological Clocks Research and Texas A&M Institute for Neuroscience. "Both Dr. Fout and Dr. Johnson are amazing teacher-scholars, and I am so happy that we can provide them with the C.J. Davidson Chair in Science and the George P. Mitchell ’40 Endowed Chair in Statistics, respectively.
"Dr. Fout’s research addresses sustainability in chemistry, a big challenge regarding our environment and medicine. Dr. Johnson is a distinguished professor and expert in the quantitative sciences addressing academic problems and health science issue with that statistical expertise. I thank the Davidson and Mitchell families for their generosity and allowing us to enhance the work of both these outstanding Arts and Sciences faculty members.”
Fout, a professor in the Department of Chemistry since August 2022, was recruited to Texas A&M with the help of a $2.9 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Rising Stars program, which targets early-stage investigators who have demonstrated the promise for continued and enhanced contributions to the field of cancer research. Her research, which spans the areas of organometallic catalysis and bioinorganic chemistry, is currently focused on designing and characterizing novel metal complexes and catalysts to address sustainability challenges in chemistry, with widespread multidisciplinary application in a host of areas ranging from the environment to medicine.
"I am honored and humbled to be a C.J. Davidson Chair in Science," Fout said. "The Davidson family's support for this distinguished chair position, along with their vision for science research and the people who carry it out here at Texas A&M, are ones for which I am truly grateful. Indeed, under the auspices of the distinguished chair position, I — along with a fantastic team of undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, colleagues and collaborators — will now seek to tackle some of the most important scientific problems, including wastewater remediation and new ways to detect cancers."
Fout received her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2009, earning the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award in 2010 for her research there. She completed a three-year National Institutes of Health/Mary Fieser Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012, where she remained for a decade prior to coming to Texas A&M. Already in her relatively young independent career working with transition metal complexes, Fout has contributed to the discovery of a new bio-inspired iron catalyst featuring a ligand capable of shuttling protons and electrons to and from the active site, effectively creating a process that could catalytically reduce groundwater oxyanion contaminants like nitrates from fertilizers and chlorine oxyanions from rocket fuel to benign species. For the past few years, she has been working to apply a similar process to transform magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), substituting iron and cobalt as inexpensive, benign alternatives to the standard rhodium and iridium catalysts, which are highly toxic.
Fout’s career honors to date include the 2017 Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, a 2016 U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Award, the 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences, a 2016 ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry Emergent Investigator in Bioinorganic Chemistry Award, a 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship and a 2014 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. She also has been recognized with awards from several scientific publications, including a 2019 Thieme Chemistry Journals Award, the 2018 Metals in Biology Gordon Conference Ed Stiefel Young Investigator Award and a 2017 Dalton Lectureship. A past chair of the ACS Organometallics subdivision, she currently serves as associate editor for the journal Catalysis Letters as well as an editorial advisory board member for Inorganic Chemistry, Organometallics and ACS Catalysis.
“I am delighted to see Alison, who is a rising star in catalysis and sustainability science, appointed to the Davidson Chair in Science," said Dr. Simon W. North, John W. Bevan Professor of Chemistry and head of Texas A&M Chemistry. "Her arrival has already made a tremendous positive impact on the Department of Chemistry, and this endowed position is well deserved.”
Johnson, who was appointed as a university distinguished professor in 2016, is a renowned expert in Bayesian statistics and using probability distributions to represent uncertainties with regard to unknown quantities. He joined the Department of Statistics in 2012 following eight years as a professor of biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. In addition to previous administrative experience as acting division head of quantitative sciences and department chair of biostatistics at MD Anderson, Johnson served as head of Texas A&M Statistics from 2014 to 2018 and subsequently as dean of the former College of Science from 2018 to 2022. Johnson earned his Ph.D. in statistics from The University of Chicago in 1989 and began his independent academic career at Duke University, serving 12 years there as a professor of statistics. Following a yearlong stint as a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2001 to 2002, he spent two years as a professor of biostatistics at the University of Michigan prior to arriving at MD Anderson in 2004.
Johnson’s distinguished career of scholarship during the past three decades includes analyzing comparative intelligences among non-human primates, probing grade inflation at American universities, examining the validity of student evaluations of teaching, and developing more effective tests for evaluating cancer drugs. He also has also developed models to estimate the reliability of space shuttles and other early stage rockets and to gauge the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In addition, he has used his statistical expertise to reinterpret the meaning of statistical significance and p-values, providing new insights into the sources of non-reproducibility of scientific research.
Johnson is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Royal Statistical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also an elected member of the International Statistics Institute. He holds two patents and has published two books, Ordinal Data Models and Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education.
"University Distinguished Professor Valen E. Johnson has demonstrated exceptional contributions in statistical research, education and service to the profession," said Dr. Branislav Vidakovic, professor and head of Texas A&M Statistics and inaugural holder of the H.O. Hartley Chair in Statistics. "Val is an outstanding researcher who excels in his cohort and has made highly influential contributions in foundations of statistical inference, and its practice in scientific applications.
To learn more about endowed faculty positions and other development-related impact opportunities in the College of Arts and Sciences, contact our development team.