Public officials are used to hearing economists’ expertise on decisions about the economy and listening to diplomats about foreign policy, so why shouldn’t scientists help national, state and local leaders make better decisions about science and technology?
A fast-growing bacterial strain found on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin in the 1950s might ultimately prove useful for carbon sequestration, biofuel production, biosynthesis of valuable chemicals and the search for novel pharmaceuticals, scientists announced in newly published paper.
Below are a few of the upcoming public lectures and events for February. All of these presentations are free and open to the public.
With the most recent Fields Medal, the major award for math, going to a woman for the first time, more attention than usual has been on the under-representation of women in math graduate programs. The American Mathematical Society found that on average 22.5 percent of Ph.D. math students in Group I (top-tier) math departments are women. However, at UT Austin, which has a Group I department, an increasing share of the math graduate students are women. They include Maja Taskovic, a fifth-year graduate student, and her sister Milica Taskovic, a first-year graduate student. Today, 32 percent of all UT Austin math graduate students are women, and in the new 2014 cohort that Milica belongs to, women make up 43 percent of Ph.D. candidates.
In the artificial intelligence age we live in, you’ll find AI in the workplace, the home, and even on a sports pitch. From hospitals to highways, artificial intelligence offers new solutions to real-world problems.
As classes start back for the spring semester, hundreds of first-year students are embarking on hands-on research projects as part of the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI). Later this year, FRI will celebrate its 10th anniversary academic year. In honor of that milestone, we visit with some of the alumni of the FRI program, like Human Development and Family Sciences senior Elvira Marquez.
The groundbreaking Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) program at The University of Texas at Austin helped a pair of students put a coveted feather in their cap quite early in their academic careers: the chance to say they’ve been published in a top-tier scientific journal from the prestigious Nature Publishing Group.
Using a host of methodologies, including a new statistical method developed at The University of Texas at Austin, an international collaboration of researchers have completed a large-scale DNA study that reveals important details about key transitions in the evolution of plant life on our planet.
Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, was interviewed by the Huffington Post Science editor David Freeman. Meyers, a pioneer in the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, discusses Ebola and how outbreaks of infectious diseases are governed by complex mathematics.
This past spring, we asked faculty, staff and students in the College of Natural Sciences community to send us images that celebrated the extraordinary beauty of science and the scientific process. We were looking for that moment where science and art collide and we succeeded.
Read our publication, The Texas Scientist, a digest covering the people and groundbreaking discoveries that make the College of Natural Sciences one of the most amazing and significant places on Earth.
