The Odds Couple

As long-time professors in their respective Texas A&M University departments, Drs. Raymond Carroll and Marcia Ory know how important it is for faculty members to feel valued. So when they decided to commemorate their 75th birthdays by funding an endowment benefiting Texas A&M’s Department of Statistics, they chose to do so in the form of five faculty fellowships.  

Unlike similar gifts created to recruit promising teachers and researchers to the university, Ory and Carroll’s fellowships are designed to benefit and support the current stellar tenured faculty members . 

“We want to retain good people who do interesting research, who interact with the world and do a good job teaching,” explained Carroll, a distinguished professor and the Jill and Stuart A. Harlin '83 Chair in Statistics.  

He hopes the fellowships ensure that faculty in his department continue to undertake research on a wide variety of topics and, ultimately, that the statistics department remains “a spectacular place to work.”  

Ory, a regents and distinguished professor for the Texas A&M School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, said the fellowships reflect her husband’s practice of fostering the kind of environment that benefits statistics students and faculty alike. Carroll has had plenty of practice to do just that throughout his 38 years at Texas A&M, including three years as department head.

“One of the things that Raymond is known for is mentoring junior faculty, then remaining colleagues with them while they’re here,” Ory said. “Some, unfortunately, have left over time. Part of the thinking behind this endowed gift, then, is to recognize and value people on their way up. Universities don’t always show enough appreciation for their faculty. This is one small way that we can ensure that five people will understand their value.” 

While five faculty members will be named the inaugural recipients of the fellowships, the reach of Ory and Carroll’s gift will ultimately stretch far beyond this first cohort. By giving to the Texas A&M Foundation in the form of an endowment, distributions will continue to fund the fellowships, supporting statistics faculty members indefinitely. 

“There's a lot of people who we could have chosen to give our money to,” Ory said. “Raymond is a statistician, so not only is he honoring the recipients with this gift, but he’s also honoring the field and his department.” 

Ory and Carroll met on a blind date when they were undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin. They graduated in 1971 and married the following year. Their life together has involved plenty of relocation as they pursued graduate degrees and worked their way up different career ladders.  

Carroll said the “brilliant visionary” Dr. John Fackler, then College of Science dean, recruited him to Texas A&M as statistics department head in 1987. His charge was to transition the department from one focused on excellent teaching to one that combined that strength with a strong research emphasis. Over the next three years, Carroll said he placed increased importance on research endeavors and hired faculty members with proven research backgrounds. The department heads that came after him followed suit. 

“So now we have fantastic teachers and we have fantastic researchers,” Carroll said. “We’ve become one of the best departments in the country.”

Over time, Carroll has developed a reputation as a global expert in error measurement modeling. At Texas A&M, he’s director of the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Statistics and founding director of the Center for Statistical Bioinformatics. 

While Carroll was reimagining the statistics department in the 1980s and 1990s, Ory — a renowned social and behavioral scientist — was helping to forge the multidisciplinary study of aging, health and behavior at the National Institutes of Health. In 2001, she transitioned to College Station where she began sharing her knowledge and expertise in this emerging field with students at Texas A&M. Among her many roles at the university is founding director of the Center for Population Health and Aging (now merged into the Center for Community Health and Aging).  

Ory and Carroll are not new to lending financial support to bolster their Texas A&M disciplines. Along with prior gifts benefiting students majoring in statistics, they have also created scholarships both in the School of Public Health and the College of Education for students involved in Ory’s field of healthy aging.  

Outside of Texas A&M, the couple has established Healthy Across the Generations—a public charity focused on healthy aging.  

The inaugural recipients of Carroll and Ory’s five faculty fellowships have not yet been named. A few of the fellowships themselves, though, carry the names of individuals etched in the two professors’ hearts. 

One of the five faculty fellowships bears the names of Carroll and Ory, while another is named for their families as a whole. The couple named a third fellowship in honor of Carroll’s youngest brother, Joseph Patrick Carroll — a banker by trade who is a frequent travel companion of the couple and who demonstrates “a healthy curiosity about statistics.” 

But of the five, it is the two memorial fellowships that hold special significance to Ory and Carroll. They bear the names of each set of parents. 

“Both of us had amazing parents,” Ory said, “who instilled in us the desire to do good, to help others and to share our rewards with others.”  

Carroll grew up in a military family, moving frequently and living as far away as Japan. His Irish-Catholic mother, Regina Carroll, was primarily responsible for raising him and his four siblings.

Ory used the word “amazing” to describe Carroll’s mother.  

“People always say mean things about mothers-in-law, but she was warm and supportive.,” She said.“She was exactly the mother that everybody would want.”  

Carroll’s father, Norman Carroll, was an Air Force colonel. His son described him as a “very good father” whose memory warrants an annual gathering of his children for the “Norman Carroll Memorial Weekend.”  

Ory grew up in the Highland Park area of Dallas. She has fond memories of her father, Marvin Ory, who died young. Her mother, Esther Ory, on the other hand, enjoyed a long, active life.  

“I'm in aging, so I always think it's important to acknowledge not just where you are, but where you've come from,” Ory said. “And I would say that my mom really is the reason that I'm so passionate about healthy aging because she was the model of someone who lived successfully until she was in her nineties.”  

In the end, Ory and Carroll said their decision to financially support Texas A&M faculty and students while simultaneously honoring their families was not a particularly difficult one.  

“We've been incredibly fortunate,” Ory said. “We've had good schooling. We've had good, steady jobs. We've been fortunate enough to be in the position of having all the resources we need. And now it’s time to think about how we can use some of our resources to benefit others.”