Biography

Hello and welcome to my biography page. I am Tim Renfro.

Here at McMurry we would like to have our students know who the professors are and where they came from. That way they can see they can achieve what ever they wish given they provide the hard work.

The first question you may ask is what kind of name is Renfro? Through tireless research of many, it can be traced back to Scotland and to the town of Renfrew in the shire of Renfrew. If you don't know where that is on the map, the big city there is Glasgow. The people with the last name Renfrew ended up in America over a small disagreement with the King of England in that they supported his cousin, which was Catholic. When they hit the shores of America in the late 1600's, they were set to work digging canals to drain the swamp from around the new city of Charleston, South Carolina. During the revolutionary war, the family split on who they favored. Those that went to Canada supported England in the war. Those of us left here in the US supported the revolution. Even today a person can plot out the locations of Renfro, Renfrow, and Renfrew across North American and see a distinct trail of immigration across the continent.

I can be broken down to being 50% Scotish, 20% Irish, 20% English, and 10% Cherokee. And yes, I am a registered Native American with the department of Interior thanks to my grandmother Wauhilla McMahan. Wauhilla, meaning little eagle in Cherokee. My mother's side is from Oklahoma with roots starting in the Cherokee Bird Clan, in Tennessee, as well as New England and jumping the Atlantic to middle England.

As for me, I was born in Texas to blue collar parents. I grew up in a little town in central Texas named McGregor. My father worked at the missle plant there, which sparked my interest in physics, engineering, and machining. I played football in both and college. I also participated in the shotput and discus in high school. I was better in shotput with a distance of 54' as my best throw.

I later went to Tarleton State in Stephenville, Texas where I majored in physics, but took a lot of electives in industrial arts and pre-engineering. I worked at Norton's Coated Abrasives my last two years school where I was exposed to manufacturing and machine automation.

After graduation I attended Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. I worked with Walter Trikoskow in the low temperature physics lab where I built a very ineffective thermostat with screw valves and a stepper motor. I however learned that butterfly valves and servos should have been the way to go with the type of system I was working with.

After SFA, I attended the University of Texas at Dallas, which is in Richardson, Texas. Why not just call it UT-Richardson? There I divided my time between being a teaching assistant for John Hoffman and Roy Chaney and working in the optical properties of solids lab for Robert Glosser. John taught me how to teach physics and be a professor. Roy taught me how to put experiments together and program in LabVIEW. Bob taught me how to do it all with very little money and a pile of donated obsolete equipment. That is the education every physics professor in the US needs. Teach, research, and have no money to do so.

After my final graduation, I spent three years as a visiting professor at the University of Dallas. This one is in Irving, Texas. While there I installed a LabView course and started bringing national instruments equipment into the electronics and optics course. My vision was to expose students to what they would see after they completed their BS. From what I hear, it stuck and the program there still uses the experimental implementations.

Upon leaving UD, I decided to try to find out what caused freshmen to tic and decided to spend a year teaching public school at Weatherford, Texas. Needless to say, it was a crash course on how messed up the state of Texas has made public education. I did managed to have 100% of my students pass the TAKS test. The best thing was I did learn a lot about working in a large operational structure.

This brings me to Abilene. It's a nice place to live. Big enough for shopping and restaurants, but small enough to have a slow pace. If super sized and being a number is not your thing, McMurry and Abilene are a place for you. It is a place a person can make a difference and hopefully I will help make it better.