Creating a Legacy of Giving

The Mossman Distinguished Lecture Series was established as the result of a generous legacy gift from the late Ken and Blaire Mossman, who met at UT in 1968 while pursuing their degrees.

Ken Mossman earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in health physics and radiation biology through the Institute of Radiation Biology, a joint program of UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1970 to 1973. Blaire earned her bachelor’s degree in 1971 from the College of Arts and Sciences where she majored in French.

An accomplished author and international expert on the effects of radiation exposure, Ken served on the faculty of Georgetown University and Arizona State University (ASU), where he was an assistant vice president for research, a professor of health physics, and director of ASU’s Office of Radiation Safety. In 2007, he was appointed administrative judge for the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board within the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In 2014, he was appointed by President Barack Obama to the US Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.

Blaire served as managing editor of several scientific journals, including Pattern Recognition, Computers in Biology and Medicine, Computer Languages, and Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics. She was founding managing editor of the latter two. Blaire was also a member of the professional staff at the National Biomedical Research Foundation in Washington, DC, an organization credited for developing the first whole-body CT scanners. Despite Blaire’s accomplished career in the sciences, her love of foreign languages and culture remained as she and Ken frequently traveled abroad.

Upon their untimely passings, Blaire in 2011 and Ken in 2014, their charitable bequests to UT were realized and included the creation of:

• The Mossman Scholars Endowment was created to help students each year travel internationally to study foreign languages. Funds from this endowment are used for travel expenses, tuition, books, and other related educational expenses.
• The Ready for the World Program Endowment provides funding toward student foreign study to help them gain the international and intercultural knowledge they need to succeed in today’s world.
• The Kenneth and Blaire Mossman Professorship attracts talented faculty from all over the world. Mossman Faculty Chair Steven Wilhelm says, “The gift creates opportunities for my graduate students and lab members to venture into areas of research that might seem preliminary or risky on the surface. But that is where some of the potential great discoveries lie.”
• The Mossman Distinguished Lecture Series Endowment funds a distinguished scholar in any academic discipline to deliver a public lecture to the community at large and a scholarly or technical lecture to faculty and students in a department closely associated with the speaker’s academic discipline, affording an intellectual enriching opportunity for the entire campus and local community.
  
  Thus far, the lectures have welcomed Van Jones, CNN host, political commentator, Emmy Award-winning producer, and author of three New York Times best-selling books; Bill Nye, the Emmy Award-winning science educator known for his TV show Bill Nye the Science Guy; and Alan Alda, best known for his role as Captain Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series M*A*S*H, but whose later career has also centered on science education including more than a decade as host of PBS’ Scientific American Frontiers.

Mayim Bialik, neuroscientist, author, and star of the CBS hit show The Big Bang Theory, speaks to a full house at Cox Auditorium during the fifth annual Mossman Distinguished Lecture.

In 2018, the university dedicated the Ken and Blaire Mossman Building in the Mossman’s honor. Located across from Ayers Hall on Cumberland Avenue, the sixth-floor building was designed for collaborative research and features the latest in teaching technology for the study of microbiology, biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, psychology, and nutrition.

Whether it was the passion they shared for science, art, and education or their desire to do good, Blaire and Ken Mossman personified the Volunteer spirit in countless ways and continue to impact the university and its students today through their legacy gift.