Two Arts And Sciences Faculty Named Regents Professors

Two professors in the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University have been designated as Regents Professors for 2023-2024 by The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.

Dr. Ping Chang, a professor in the Department of Oceanography and holder of the Louis & Elizabeth Scherck Chair in Oceanography, and Dr. Bani K. Mallick, a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistics and holder of the Susan M. Arseven ’75 Chair in Data Science and Computational Statistics, are among 18 A&M System faculty members who were nominated for the prestigious appointment, announced Nov. 19 after being approved during the A&M System Board of Regents’ most recent meeting held Nov. 7-8 the Texas A&M campus. Thirteen agency service, extension or research professionals within the A&M System also were recognized with the Regents Fellows Service Award.

The Board established the Regents Professor Award program in 1996 to recognize employees who have made exemplary contributions to their university or agency and to the people of Texas. To date, 323 faculty members have been named Regents Professors.

Nominees must be full-time professors or senior-level professionals who have held that rank in the A&M System for at least five years and have produced a distinguished record of teaching, research and/or service. The selection process begins with a call for nominations from the chancellor, after which an internal selection committee is formed within each institution or agency. Final nominations are put forth to the chief executive officer of each respective entity and then subjected to a System-level review consisting of academic vice chancellors and past recipients of the awards. Finally, nominations are forwarded to the chancellor and the board for final approval.

Along with the perpetual Regents Professor title for the duration of their A&M System service, recipients are recognized with a commemorative medallion that is presented along with an inscribed nameplate and certificate encased in a hand-crafted wooden shadow box as part of a special ceremony, to be held in conjunction with an upcoming Board of Regents meeting.

Chang, who joined the Texas A&M faculty in 1990, is an expert on climate dynamics and climate prediction, along with global and regional climate modeling. He leads a research group in global and regional climate modeling studies and has developed research collaborations with many institutions in the U.S., Asia and Europe. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. Chang’s research involves the theoretical understanding of climate variability and predictability, including El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Tropical Atlantic Variability and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability. He has published nearly 200 refereed journal articles, with some of his research being used to guide the design of major international research programs, such as the Climate and Ocean-Variability, Predictability and Change (CLIVAR) Research Program. He co-chaired the International CLIVAR Atlantic Research Panel and was a contributing author to three chapters in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He recently spearheaded an international collaboration on high-resolution Earth system prediction, making groundbreaking contributions to climate modeling and prediction. A 2019 fellow of the American Meteorology Society and a 2023 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chang's career awards include a 1993 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a 2003 Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award in Research and the National Center for Atmospheric Research's 2015 Francis Bretherton Visitorship.

Mallick, a member of the Texas A&M faculty since 1998, is globally renowned as a pioneer in Bayesian nonparametric regression and classification research and considered one of today’s most influential and productive statisticians. He serves as director of both the Center for Statistical Bioinformatics and the Bayesian Bioinformatics Laboratory. To date in his three-decade career, Mallick has developed novel methodology and theory that has become the foundation for interdisciplinary research in myriad fields, from bioinformatics and veterinary medicine to engineering and traffic mapping. His research in Bayesian modeling and computation has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy and Department of Defense. In addition to serving as an editor for the Indian statistics journal Sankhya, he has authored and edited six books, including the textbook, Bayesian Methods of Nonlinear Classification and Regression, which is regarded as one of the definitive works in the discipline. Equally revered as an instructor and mentor at Texas A&M, Mallick has graduated dozens of doctoral students while serving on more than 50 additional Ph.D. and M.S. committees in the past decade alone. More than 70 percent of his students have joined academia in top universities or secured positions at prominent firms, including IBM, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline and the Penn Cancer Center. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Royal Statistical Society, Mallick also is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. His previous career honors include the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Indian Statistical Association, the Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair for 2017-2018, Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Awards in Research (2006) and Graduate Mentoring (2019) and the University of Connecticut Department of Statistics Distinguished Alumnus Award for 2020-2021.

Find additional information on the Regents Professor Award and a list of past recipients.