This spring, three retired faculty leaders at The University of Texas at Dallas were awarded honorary emeritus titles for their dedicated service and long-lasting influence on the University.
Drs. Paul Fishwick, Edward J. Harpham and Allan Dean Sherry joined 90 current retired UT Dallas presidents, deans and professors who have received this lifetime academic appointment. Emeritus appointments recognize faculty members who have served with particular distinction and honor and who have established a bond with the institution.
“UT Dallas has been most fortunate to employ many remarkable faculty members, as the long list of emeritus appointments attests,” said Dr. Inga H. Musselman, vice president for academic affairs, provost and the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair of Academic Leadership. “Not only are they talented, but they’re versatile, too. Drs. Fishwick, Harpham and Sherry showed that with their accomplishments.”
Dr. Paul Fishwick
Chair Emeritus of Arts, Humanities, and Technology
Dr. Paul Fishwick, who retired on Jan. 1, 2023, held dual appointments in the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (as it was known at the time), and in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science as a professor of computer science. He also led the Creative Automata Lab, designed to bring human elements to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.
Fishwick pioneered the area of aesthetic computing, bringing together elements of art, modeling, simulation and engineering, with the goal of exploring new representational approaches. He built models that showed what abstract concepts and complex equations physically represent. These representations of mathematical formulas and computer software were intended to improve understanding of how abstract artifacts work.
Early in his career, Fishwick worked as a programmer analyst for Newport News Shipbuilding. He also worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia as a systems analyst. Later, he was director of the University of Florida’s digital arts and sciences programs.
When he joined the UT Dallas faculty in 2013, he was appointed to the Arts, Humanities, and Technology Distinguished University Chair.
Dr. Edward J. Harpham
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Dr. Edward J. Harpham joined UTD in 1981 as an assistant professor of government and political economy. In 1998 he was appointed the first director of the Collegium V Honors Program, and by 2001, he was a professor of political science. In 2014 he was named inaugural dean of the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College, a post he held until 2021. He retired in January 2023.
Harpham is credited with helping to build the University’s honors education offerings, including the Collegium V program, which he directed for 16 years; the Eugene McDermott Scholars Program; the National Merit Scholars Program; the Terry Scholarship Program; the Texas Legislative Internship Program; and seven more programs.
In addition to guiding the Honors College, Harpham served as associate dean of undergraduate education from 1998 to 2010 and as associate provost from 2008 to 2021. He held the Mary McDermott Cook Chair in the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College until 2021.
Harpham’s research explored how economic ideas shaped the understanding of politics and public policy in the West. He also studied the relationship between technological transformations and political change in American political history. More recently, he has investigated the theories of the passions found in modern liberal thought, particularly those developed in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Dr. Allan Dean Sherry
Chair Emeritus of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
When Dr. Allan Dean Sherry retired in 2022, he had held the Cecil H. and Ida Green Distinguished Chair in Systems Biology since 2005. Sherry also held a dual appointment as a professor of radiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, which named him professor emeritus in the Advanced Imaging Research Center — a joint research facility with UTD, UT Arlington and UT Southwestern — for which he served as the founding director until 2019.
Over 50 years, Sherry’s academic career flourished apace with the growth of UTD as he established himself as a trailblazer in designing chemicals called macrocyclic ligands for use in medical imaging. His research has played a critical role in refining diagnostic tools for more insightful diagnoses of medical conditions ranging from cancer to heart disease.
Originally hired as an inorganic chemist at UTD in 1972, Sherry quickly developed an interest in biochemistry and, together with colleagues from UT Southwestern, developed tracer molecules that can be used with MRIs to measure changes in metabolic pathways present in certain diseases, including obesity. They also developed molecules that report on key biological indicators of tumors using MRI. By the mid-1990s, he founded a company, Macrocyclics, a UTD spinoff that produces specialized chemical compounds used in the pharmaceutical industry and academic research.
At UT Dallas, Sherry headed the Department of Chemistry from 1979 to 1990 and was interim dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in 2020. In December 2022, he was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.