Scholars Colloquium

Texas State Historian
Archivist, Texas Tech University Southwest Collections

On September 18, 2018, Governor Greg Abbott named Monte L. Monroe the Texas State Historian. As such, Monroe is responsible for increasing public knowledge about the rich and diverse history of the state, encouraging the teaching of Texas history in public schools, consulting with state leaders to promote Texas history, and making presentations on Texas history topics. Based on his success during his first term as Texas State Historian, Monroe was reappointed by Governor Abbott on September 28, 2020, to a second term as State Historian.

Dr. Monroe is Archivist of the Southwest Collection and on faculty at Texas Tech University. Recently, the prestigious Philosophical Society of Texas elected him to membership.  He was a founding board member of the Humanities Center at Texas Tech, serving over five years.  Formerly editor of the West Texas Historical Review, he has taught and published widely on Texas history. He is chair of the Texas State Historical Association Archives Committee and serves on the Executive Advisory Committee of the Handbook of Texas Women Online. He is a former board member of the Texas Historical Records Advisory Board. He also served on the boards of the Lubbock Centennial Committee, the West and East Texas Historical Associations, and the Texas Map Society, and is a Fellow of the West Texas Historical Association. He is president of the Rotary Club of Lubbock Foundation, former president of the Downtown Rotary Club of Lubbock, and immediate past president of The Meriwether Society, Inc., a large national family history organization. In addition, he served on the Lubbock Tornado Memorial Committee. He was formerly Secretary General of the Pan American Taekwondo Union, encompassing 33 member nations, an International Master Instructor, 6^th Degree Black Belt, and International Referee in Taekwondo. He was the first American, one of 24 in the world, to officiate that sport at its debut at the 1988 Seoul Games. He served again at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games and remains the only American to have officiated at two Olympic events.

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Postdoctoral Researcher, Texas A&M University

Daniel Whitefield began his academic career as a Math major at Lubbock Christian in the Fall of 2009 with plans to transfer to an engineering program once he had finished his basics at LCU. However, he fell in love with LCU and decided to double major in Math and Biology so as not to hinder his chances at getting into a Biomedical Engineering graduate program. Later, in talking with his academic advisor, Dr. Byron Rogers, he realized that he was only two classes shy of earning a Chemistry degree as well. He took those additional classes and graduated from LCU with bachelor’s degrees in Math, Biology, and Chemistry in the Spring of 2015. Daniel went on to study Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA starting as a master’s student before transferring over to the doctoral program. He worked in the lab of Kris Noel Dahl, PhD studying chromatin mechanics using a fluorescence microscopy technique known as SINK. During his time at Carnegie Mellon, Daniel co-authored multiple peer reviewed publications in widely read scientific journals. He successfully defended his thesis, entitled ‘Chromatin Mechanics: Starting Local, Going Global’, in July of 2021. After that, Dr. Whitefield moved to Texas A&M University Entomology Department to begin his current position as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Zach Adelman, PhD. He is currently studying DNA repair and gene drive in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with the goal of using genetic engineering to help control mosquito borne diseases.