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A vintage black-and-white photograph of a couple smiling at the camera from inside a vintage car.
Nancy and Ron Stinson, who got married while Ron was an undergraduate student at Texas A&M, ride away from their September 1952 wedding in Ron’s roommate’s 1949 Ford four-door sedan. | Image: Courtesy of Shawn Stinson

Although his career took him across the country and all over the world, Ron Stinson ’53 never stopped being an Aggie and never stopped supporting Texas A&M. In 2000, Stinson and his wife, Nancy, established an endowment for the Texas A&M University Department of Nuclear Engineering to fund a scholarship program and a professorship. Since then, more than 200 students have received support as Stinson scholars through the Nancy and Ron Stinson Scholarship Fund. Ron Stinson passed away in 2019, and Nancy Stinson passed away earlier this year. Now, the department has recognized its first recipient of the Stinson Professorship: nuclear engineering professor Jim E. Morel.

Morel is the director of the Center for Large-Scale Scientific Simulations and co-directs the Joint Center for Resilient National Security, a collaboration between the Texas A&M University System and Los Alamos National Laboratory. His impactful research in the field of computational radiation transport includes developing the first successful deterministic numerical methods for problems involving relativistic coupled electron-photon transport, and his work is of particular importance to the national laboratories of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“I am deeply honored to have been named the Nancy and Ron Stinson Professor,” Morel said. “Everyone in our department greatly appreciates the extremely generous gift by the Stinsons' of this professorship. Ron Stinson was chair of our advisory committee when I joined the department. He was one of our first and most distinguished graduates, and everyone who knew him had the utmost respect and admiration for him.”

A Life of Professional and Personal Adventures

Growing up in the post-war era, as nuclear technology was just getting its start, young Stinson dreamed of being a cowboy. As a teenager, he often spent his summers driving a combine harvester from Fort Worth to work the fields in Wyoming and Idaho. 

“He was a rough-and-tough and humble guy,” said his son, Shawn Stinson. “His master plan growing up was to go to A&M and get a degree in range management. According to him, that's what all ranchers and cowboys-to-be would get a degree in.”

After he graduated from Texas A&M in 1953 with his range management degree, Stinson joined the U.S. Army, a period that would change the trajectory of his career. In 1954, the Army added to its arsenal the MGR-1 Honest John rocket, a transportable nuclear-capable surface-to-surface rocket. Two of these rocket systems were sent to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where Stinson served in the 7th Field Artillery Rocket Battery. Thanks to Stinson and his peers’ dedication to understanding this new piece of equipment, the 7th Field Artillery Rocket Battery was selected as the first tactical unit to fire an Honest John rocket. The battery was then deployed to Darmstadt, Germany, where Stinson continued to take the lead on the new weapon.

“That turned him onto new technology, particularly atomic energy,” his son, Scott Stinson, said.

After working with nuclear projects in the military, Stinson came back to school in 1958 for a master’s degree from Texas A&M’s brand-new nuclear engineering program. He first had to spend more than a year catching up on qualifications to start his master’s degree.

“(Nuclear engineering) was totally different,” said Red Scott, a retired army brigadier general and Stinson’s roommate and life-long friend from his undergraduate years. “(In range management), he had to take practically none of the math that engineers take during their first couple of years — instead, he took biology. When he was in range management, he would have tree branches from his studies in his room.”

He completed his master’s degree in 1961, one of the first two graduates from Texas A&M’s fledgling nuclear engineering program.

Stinson began a successful career at General Electric, where he worked at the Hanford Site in Washington State and became the manager of nuclear safety. He then managed power production for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, orchestrating the construction of a nuclear power plant, before moving to General Atomics to work on high-temperature gas reactors. In 1976, he co-founded Management Analysis Company, an engineering consultant company for nuclear projects, then founded Atlas Consulting Group in 1993, which focused on utilities and energy.

In 1987 and 1988, Stinson took a break from his consulting business when he was elected president of the American Nuclear Society (ANS). This position enabled Stinson to travel internationally and contribute to the global nuclear energy effort. In 1987, shortly after the reactor accident at Chernobyl, he joined a team from ANS that traveled to the then-Soviet Union to provide expertise on managing the explosion’s aftermath. He also addressed the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, among other international commitments for ANS.

Despite his active career, Stinson always made time for his family, coaching Little League baseball and leading outdoor excursions. Stinson instilled in his children a love for the outdoors, from skiing in Utah to scuba diving along the California coast. His work required him to travel frequently, as well, giving his children a taste for seeing new cultures and new places.

As he traveled the world and built his career on the other side of the country, Stinson never forgot about his Aggie roots. In 1999, he served as the first chair of the Texas A&M Nuclear Engineering External Advisory Council for ten years. While leading the advisory council, he used his extensive professional network from decades in the nuclear industry to bring attention to the nuclear engineering department.

“After he graduated, he made it a point to be very closely tied to the nuclear engineering department,” Scott said. “He knew people all over the place, so he just recruited them all up and made a nuclear engineering industry support committee there in the department.”

Shawn Stinson said his father continuously talked about his time at Texas A&M. Nancy and Ron Stinson’s gift shows both their devotion to Texas A&M and their hope that the next generation of students finds that same passion.

“They were so grateful to what A&M offered them,” Shawn Stinson said. “In hindsight, he realized what a critical and important role A&M allowed him. They left Texas in the early 60s, but they never forgot or left their roots.”