again, remind you that you are sitting in the newest ...

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Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen. I think the best thing that I could do is to play that video

again, remind you that you are sitting in the newest building on the campus of one of the nation’s

premier universities – one that continues to move on a tremendous trajectory, bridging access

and excellence,

being listed as the 5th fastest growing public doctoral university in the nation by the

Chronicle of Higher Education,

being ranked 5th in the nation for its diversity index by US News and World report,

first in North Texas and the Metroplex for contribution to the public good in three

categories of social mobility, research and service by the Washington Monthly, and

having an IPEDS annual enrollment that is one of the largest in the State, that at a state

allocation of $4,737 per full time equivalent student is $1,036 less than the average for

the Emerging Research University group, and $2,126 less than the average for the

doctoral group,

and then stop. But theres so much going on at UTA that I would not be doing justice to our

tremendous faculty, staff and students if I did not say just a bit more.

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So with that in mind, and with your permission here are just a few more headlines and bragging

points from the last few months - #1 for adult learners, #1 for Veterans, and a leader globally in

unlocking the secrets of matter.

From high jumper Alexus Henry who won UTA’s first ever NCAA outdoor track and field

individual championship, to Prof. Frank Lewis who won the coveted 2018 John Ragazzini

Award from the American Automatic Control Council and who at any top university would

already be in the National Academy of Engineering, to Norry Niven and his students who have

won two Telly awards and an international CLIO award for commercials, to the College of

Education’s Masters degree in Curriculum & Instruction which is ranked #1 in the nation, UTA

is reaching ever higher levels of excellence every day.

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As Mayor Greene said in a recent article, we are “enjoying a remarkable September”

As you may remember, we had set enrollment goals of 43,000 students reported to the THECB

and 65,000 overall for 2020. Our Fall 2018 enrollment reported to the THECB was just shy of

42,500 students, up nearly 2% from last fall with the largest freshman class in the university’s

history. At this rate, we will exceed our goal by about 1,000 students in Fall 2020. This class is

not only 4.4% larger than last years but the number of new students scoring in the top 5 percent

nationally on college entrance exams increased by 15.4 percent this fall compared to last fall. I

should emphasize that while we continue to attract more of the very best from across the state we

are committed to our values of access and are among the leaders nationally for bridging access

and excellence as acknowledged by our recent Washington Post ranking. As you know, we

serve a vast population of adult, returning, and “non-traditional” students through our online

programs which feature multiple starts and varied term lengths. Over the last academic year we

served 59,836 students seeking degrees and academic certificates.

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We continue to increase rates of degree attainment with 13,727 students being awarded degrees

in the last academic year, a 7.7% increase over the previous year. I should point out that our

2020 goal was 13,250 degrees – a target that we have exceeded 2 years ahead of time. Since the

2013-14 academic year we have increased our Fall enrollment by 27.5% while the number of

degrees awarded has increased by 44.9%, emphasizing the wonderful work being done by our

faculty and staff in enabling our students to realize their goals, changing not just their own lives

but those of their families and the communities in which they live. I should note that for the 5th

year in a row we have exceeded the Tier 1 target of 200 PhDs.

Our research enterprise, fueled by our internationally renowned faculty, continues to grow with

total research expenditures crossing the $100 M mark this year and restricted research

expenditures, the criterion used for Tier 1 attainment, crossing the target of $45 M, bringing us

one step closer to NRUF status. We are now focused on meeting the last remaining criterion of

having 5 members of the National Academies and are hard at work recruiting three additional

members so that we can reach NRUF status. This will take a lot of effort and I will reach out to

you for assistance as these individuals are hard to recruit. My thanks to Raj and the executive

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committee for the assistance they provided in making a strong case to a world renowned

bioengineer. With a bit of luck we will land him. We are already pursuing three others – experts

in structural engineering, public health, and high energy physics and I hope to have some good

news to share with you the next time we meet.

While I will not have time today to discuss our research in depth I did want to give you a short

insight into advances being made under the 4 theme areas.

While our work in Cancer and Aging continues to grow in strength we are also very active in

brain health from fundamental science to technologies for screening and analysis and the

development of devices and techniques to means of providing psychological support. Our

faculty are not only using functional near-infrared spectroscopy to map how brain networks are

modulated as a result of stimulation but are also assessing how and why low emitting light

sources at the appropriate wavelength can stimulate mitochondria to promote wound healing, and

relieve inflammation and pain. They are investigating traumatic brain injuries through

development of complex models of shockwaves that pass through the brain affecting fluids by

microcavitation, as well as the impact of mechanical forces caused by shock on neurons, and

assessing new therapies and polymeric compounds that might aid and accelerate the self-repair

of brain cells. In addition, others continue to develop theories, frameworks, and models that

track brain activity, aid in learning, and assist in addressing issues such as dementia and

Alzheimers.

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Our location, at the center of a growing and thriving metropolitan area, provides a wonderful

laboratory for our researchers. They are advancing not just the state of knowledge and

scholarship as related to sustainable urban communities but also having a profound impact on the

future development of communities to ensure against the formation of urban deserts and social

inequality because of lack of transportation and housing, the resilience and safety of the built

infrastructure, the effects and mitigation of runoff resulting from storms and flash floods, and

even the inspection of pipelines and bridges enabling local and state agencies to save valuable

tax dollars while ensuring efficient services to residents. It is a testament to our faculty that local

cities including Arlington, Fort Worth and Plano as well as State Agencies are engaging with

them to address aspects related to planning, design, and inspection. In one case, the use of

technology developed by faculty in the department of civil engineering saved $17 M in repair

costs resulting in only 1,000 feet of pipeline having to be replaced rather than over 18,000 feet

that would have been conducted had our faculty not been involved.

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From the development of a mechanistic and process-level understanding of how the fluid and

radionuclide movements occur in rock formations as a means of improving safety and reliability

of nuclear waste repositories, to the development of technologies to aid in rapid environmentally

benign decomposition of chemicals used by the military to enable in-situ cleanup of

contaminated soils and groundwater, our faculty are focused on enabling a cleaner and safer

environment. Our vision as a university is to not only have a profound impact on our metroplex

as it grows into a megacity but to also influence other megacities, current and future, globally.

Through leadership in the area of landfill management UTA’s Solid Waste Institute for

Sustainability is assisting the city of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia in solving their waste management

issues through a $4 million agreement that will not only provide technical assistance but will also

educate two post-doctorate researchers and five doctoral students annually for 5 years to enable

the development of highly skilled intellectual capital for Ethiopia. “Bold Solutions – Global

Impact” is not just a tag line for our Strategic Plan – it’s how we put research into practice.

The harnessing of big data to enable discoveries is a critical part of our strategic plan. From the

fundamental science research conducted by our high energy Physicists, to the genomic analysis

done by our biologists and biochemists, and the complex systems models being developed our

engineers to advance the use of groups of unmanned aerial vehicles, big data could well be in our

DNA. Our faculty are not only using it to better understand materials durability & damage

tolerance, but are also using it to predict disease spread through social interactions, and to enable

doctors to assess and detect cardiac activity through the application of wearable sensor systems

using the internet of things.

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Our teaching and research enterprises are powered by tremendously talented scholars and

researchers. Over the past 3 years, we have recruited from the very best universities across the

nation adding strength to areas in which we already excelled and building critical mass in

specially selected areas. Focused hiring using prioritization set by our Strategic Plan has enabled

us to build strengths across disciplines hiring by theme area rather than by traditional department

or program. Since we last met we have added three new Deans each a tremendous leader and

visionary.

You all know Harry Dombroski as a member of the President’s Advisory Board and our previous

chair. A longtime Hunt Consolidated and Hunt Oil Co. executive who graduated from UTA in

1979, Harry brings tremendous business leadership, a passion for excellence and a plan to not

just grow the College but to make it one of the very best in the nation. He joined us in April and

has hit the ground running, already restructuring the College to better position it for the future,

launched a new set of online MBA specializations, and is aggressively building strengths in data

analytics and health care administration, among other areas.

Adrian Parr took over as Dean of CAPPA in July, and joined us from the University of

Cincinnati where she was a Professor in the Department of Political Science in the College of

Arts and Science with a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and Interior Design. She

served as the director of the Taft Research Center for Humanities and was a Distinguished

Fellow of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. She is a world renowned scholar specializing

in environmental philosophy, sustainability, water and climate change politics, and creative

practice, holds a prestigious UNESCO Chair in water and will be making significant

contributions to our themes in sustainable urban communities and global environmental impact.

As you know we have been engaged in a national search for a Dean of our College of Nursing &

Health Innovation to succeed Anne Bavier who retired after taking this new college to great

heights of excellence growing in size and reputation. I’m pleased to announce that we have

recruited Dr. Elizabeth Merwin, the Executive Vice Dean of arguably the best College of

Nursing in the country at Duke University, to serve as our next Dean. Dr. Merwin is the Ann

Henshaw Gardiner Professor of Nursing, and has appointments both in the School of Nursing

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and in the School of Medicine where she is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

A fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, and a distinguished scholar in the areas of public

health and health care delivery, her work has focused on improving care for underserved and

rural populations, particularly those in rural communities and minority populations. With

consistent funding from NIH and other agencies over the last 25 years, improving access and

outcomes of care has been the focus of her research program, particularly for rural, mental

health, impoverished and/or minority populations. She brings significant administrative and

research expertise as well as experience in the development of innovative programs including

simulation and online teaching. Needless to say, this is a coup for UTA and underlines the

growing reputation and excellence of our College and University.

These three Deans are joined by over 70 new faculty who joined us this fall in areas such as

sustainability, environmental protection and water politics, data analytics and autonomous

vehicles, machine learning and artificial intelligence, crowd and social sensing and strategic

communications, health disparities and child mental health policy, and so many more areas of

intense discovery and enquiry. It is a compliment to the reputation of our university that these

faculty came from the very best universities across the nation – Yale, MIT, Rice, Stanford, UC

Berkeley, the Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, the

University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University. UTA is now a destination of

choice for top faculty and this is a tremendous achievement in itself.

While we are still only a bit more than half way through our Strategic Plan, we are already

involved in a re-evaluation of our plan, its progress, and how it might be revised to better

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position the university.

This work is being done by “Task Teams” led by VPs not just in the 4 theme areas and 6 guiding

aspirations, but also in 7 areas of operations so that we develop true business plans providing

detailed benchmarks and metrics for tracking, assessment, and decision making.

Months of intense work at all levels have resulted in 16 draft documents which are being shared

with the university at large and which over the next few months will be formalized providing a

renewed vision and goals not just for the period till 2020 but also to set the stage beyond that. I

look forward to having our leadership team present details to you at our Spring meeting.

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Even as we finalize these plans we have a set of priorities for the current year representing strong

forward motion with continued focus on excellence and innovation.

Some of you might remember a set of imperatives that I discussed in my first year at UTA. We

believed at that time that we could succeed by being Mavericks, by working across disciplinary

bounds, by focusing on who we felt we could be and working together to achieve those goals.

We knew that as an upstart we could not beat the Jones’ by trying to catch up but that we would

do it by thinking quick, thinking new, thinking big and believing that the future is NOW rather

than 5, 10 or 15 years ago. As we get ready for the ribbon cutting of SEIR, the building we are

in exemplifies UTA, today and into the future – bold, collaborative, innovative and focused on

the good of our community, our state and the world, motivated to transform health and the

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human condition, enabling healthier, more productive and better lives for humankind, an

example of what we are doing – setting standards for others to follow. In fact, a delegation from

Princeton University led by their Provost will be here next week to look at this building and what

we have envisaged as our future, as they start planning for theirs, and the bionorthTX meeting

will be held here on the 10th looking at the future of biotech in the metroplex.

Before I end I’d like to ask you a simple question – Vanilla or Pistachio, Vanilla or Chocolate,

Vanilla or …? No, I’m not asking about the flavor of ice cream at lunch, but whether we, and

you, should take a path that’s easy, comfortable and safe, or one that is distinct, prestigious and

impactful? A few years ago we picked the latter and due to your support and guidance we are on

as tremendous journey to pre-eminence, one that is ensuring that we will be the model 21st

Century Urban Research University, being the “go to place” and the “thought leader.” Thank

you for making this happen.