Two Texas A&M Health faculty named Regents Professors

Texas A&M System Regents last week named two Texas A&M Health faculty members as Regents Professors for 2022–2023: Jay Maddock, PhD, FAAHB, and Samba Reddy, PhD, RPh.

The Texas A&M University System Regents established the Regents Professor Awards program in 1996 to recognize faculty who have made extraordinary contributions to their university or agency, as well as to the people of Texas. Maddock and Reddy are two of 12 Texas A&M University System faculty members and 11 agency service, extension or research professionals named as Regents Professors and Regents Fellows for 2022–2023.

Maddock joined Texas A&M in 2015 and served as dean of the School of Public Health from 2015–2019. Prior to that he served as chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa from 2006–2014. Maddock has served in a variety of national and international leadership roles throughout his career including chair of the Hawaii Board of Health, president of the American Academy of Health Behavior and secretary of the Asia-Pacific Academic Consortium for Public Health.

Maddock is an internationally recognized expert in socioecological approaches to improving health. From 2000–2015, he led the research and evaluation arm of the Healthy Hawaii Initiative, a multicomponent, statewide effort to increase physical activity, improve nutrition and reduce smoking among the people of Hawaii. Currently, he serves as the director of the Center for Health & Nature a collaborative effort between Texas A&M, Houston Methodist and Texan by Nature. Maddock has been recognized by numerous awards throughout his career including the Award of Excellence from the American Public Health Associate Council on Affiliates, Bank of Hawaii Community Leader of the Year, 40 under 40 in Hawaii and the Chancellor’s Citation for Meritorious Teaching.

Maddock has authored over 140 peer reviewed publications and received over $18 million in extramural funding as principal investigator. His work is highly cited with 18 papers that have been cited over 100 times each.

Reddy is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics at the School of Medicine. He earned pharmacy and doctoral degrees and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Reddy joined Texas A&M in 2008, where he pioneered the field of neurosteroids by researching epilepsy neurotherapeutics. His seminal contributions include discovery of a neurocode for treating epilepsy and a novel neurosteroid-replacement therapy to treat epilepsy, women’s health and brain disorders. Reddy’s transformational contributions led to the development of two new medicines: ganaxolone (Ztalmy), the first neurosteroid for epilepsy, and brexanolone (Zulresso), the first FDA-approved drug for postpartum depression, which are now used in clinics worldwide. He also discovered that neurosteroids can terminate hard-to-treat seizures, called status epilepticus, and his product was selected by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for phase 3 clinical trials in patients.

Reddy is a prolific inventor, holding several patents and inventions and 150 invited/keynote talks. Named one of the world’s top 2 percent of scientists by the Stanford University survey, he has published more than 220 papers/chapters and five popular textbooks, mentored and trained around 100 students and postdocs, and authored/co-authored around 450 presentations. He has received awards from top scientific organizations in the United States, India and Europe, and is an elected fellow in three major organizations: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS), and the American Epilepsy Society. He is an associate/guest editor of Experimental Neurology, Current Protocols, Epilepsy Currents, and Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience journals. In 2020, Reddy received the AAPS Global Leader Award, a pivotal distinction for his stellar research contributions with an outstanding impact on public health worldwide.