James T. Hackett Sr. is on the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and College of Liberal Arts. A management lecturer for Texas McCombs, Hackett teaches an undergraduate course on moral leadership in economics for UT’s Plan II Honors Program. He was previously a member of the Texas McCombs Council on Leadership and Ethics, as well as the National Petroleum Council and the Society of Petroleum Engineers.

Hackett is president of Tessellation Services LLC, a consulting business focused on business governance, leadership, and ethics. He serves on the board of directors of three Fortune 500 companies and chairs an advanced nuclear power company listed on the NYSE. He is on the board of trustees of the Baylor College of Medicine (former chairman) and Rice University, where he also teaches. He has extensive experience in the energy industry, including as chairman and CEO of Anadarko Petroleum Corp., as well as in finance, having served as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas.

Hackett earned a Master of Theology degree from Harvard Divinity School, where he studied religion, ethics, and politics, with an emphasis on Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. His MBA is also from Harvard, and Hackett holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated with high honors after attending the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Hackett and his wife, Maureen, funded and founded the Hackett Center for Mental Health, which focuses on the unique needs of Greater Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast. He has testified before Congress to successfully advocate for national mental health parity legislation and helped lead a successful effort among Houston-based employers to voluntarily implement mental health parity in their medical plans.