The Trotter Prize (named after Dr. Ide P. Trotter Sr., former dean of the Texas A&M Graduate School.) is awarded at Texas A&M University and is part of an endowed lecture series. It is awarded "for pioneering contributions to the understanding of the role of information, complexity and inference in illuminating the mechanisms and wonder of nature" and includes The Trotter Lecture which "seeks to reveal connections between science and religion, often viewed in academia as non-overlapping, if not rival, worldviews.

Previous winners

Nobel Prize winners Charles Hard Townes and Francis Crick received the inaugural award at A&M's Rudder Theater in 2002. Townes spoke about connections between science and faith. Promoter of the notion of intelligent design William A. Dembski shared the award in 2005 with theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. Simon Conway Morris received the award and spoke in 2007. Francis Collins, the director of the human genome project, and Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize recipient for physics, shared the Trotter Prize in 2008 and discussed the interplay between science and religion. Astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich also won the prize. Robert L. Park has criticized the award for being given to William A. Dembski, a proponent of the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design, saying it is given out for "overlapping the magisteria" (a comment based on Stephen Jay Gould's concept of non-overlapping magisteria, NOMA, the idea that science and religion inherently do not overlap).

Honorees/ speakers