Contact: Addie Mayfield

STARKVILLE, Miss.—A new scholarship has been established in the Graduate School at Mississippi State University in memory of an MSU alumnus and former professor who also was an internationally recognized pioneer and author in digital speech processing.

The newly created Dr. James L. Flanagan Endowed Graduate Scholarship is being established by his wife Mildred B. Flanagan, a Greenwood native who now lives in Warren, New Jersey.

The scholarship will be awarded to full-time graduate students pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field of study. Preference will be given to female applicants to encourage women in these fields.

Also a native of Greenwood, James Flanagan graduated from MSU in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and went on to obtain his master’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1950 and 1955, respectively.

Flanagan began his career in communications engineering, acoustics and signal processing at AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. During his 33 years with the company, Flanagan developed the Audix One voice-mail system and was responsible for nearly 50 patents, including an artificial human larynx.

After leaving AT&T Bell Labs in 1990 as director of information principles research, Flanagan accepted a position at Rutgers University as director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing. He later assumed the role of vice president of research for Rutgers before returning home to MSU in 2006 to serve as distinguished research professor of electrical and computer engineering in the James Worth Bagley College of Engineering.

Among Flanagan’s numerous national and international recognitions are the 1996 National Medal of Science, the 2005 Medal of Honor of the engineering professional society IEEE, and honorary doctorates from the University of Paris-Sud, the Polytechnic University of Madrid and MSU (2012).

The family’s passion for MSU runs deep, rearing three generations of Bulldog students including James Flanagan’s father Hanks, brother Thomas Marion, and three sons. In 2000, James, Mildred and Thomas Marion Flanagan established the H. G. Flanagan Endowed Scholarship in the Bagley College of Engineering in memory of the family’s patriarch.

For more information on establishing endowed scholarships at MSU, contact Jack McCarty, executive director of development for the MSU Foundation, at (662) 325-9580 or jmccarty@foundation.msstate.edu.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.