Sam Payne, professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded one of this year's two Max Planck-Humboldt Medals. The medal is financed by the German government and awarded jointly by the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
A chemist at the University of Texas at Austin has been awarded the top prize for chemical physics, given biennially by the American Physical Society. Davarajan Thirumalai received the Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics for his groundbreaking work in developing "analytical and computational approaches to soft-matter systems" and applying these approaches to "the transitional behavior of supercooled fluids and glasses, folding dynamics of protein and RNA biopolymers, and functioning of molecular motors."
Over the last six years, faculty, staff and students from across the College of Natural Sciences have submitted hundreds of images from their scholarly research for our annual Visualizing Science competition, and these images have been viewed by tens of thousands of people. The submitted images, often beautiful and stunning, are the ones that spoke to their creators, inspiring and informing them as they followed their scientific passions.
The first full week of October is like a science-lover's World Series: Each year, the spotlight falls on high-impact science, when day after day, a series of Nobel Prizes and other prestigious awards are announced one after another. [Update: In 2019, a UT Austin faculty member in the Cockrell School of Engineering, John Goodenough, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry during Science's Big Week.]
Livia Schiavinato Eberlin, an assistant professor of chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, has won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, sometimes called a "genius" award. The prestigious, no-strings-attached five-year fellowship awards $625,000 to each recipient.
Four UT Austin faculty members have won major awards for 2019 from the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the International Conference on Calixarenes for their contributions to an array of research areas.
Molecular Biosciences professor Kenneth Johnson has been named a 2019 Society Fellow of The Biophysical Society for his influential research and support of biophysics.
Three UT Austin chemistry professors—Jonathan Sessler, Dave Thirumalai and Stephen Martin—were awarded lifetime achievement awards this summer.
Mathematician Mark Daniels is one of 27 University of Texas faculty members chosen to receive prestigious 2018 Regents' Outstanding Teaching Awards. The awards recognize innovative teaching and commitment to student success. They each will receive $25,000 in recognition of their commitment to student success.
Luis Caffarelli, the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in Mathematics #1 at The University of Texas at Austin, is a recipient of one of the world's biggest prizes for mathematics, the 2018 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences, which comes with a monetary award of $1.2 million. Awarded by the Hong Kong-based Shaw Foundation, the Shaw Prize honors recent breakthroughs by researchers in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, and life science and medicine.
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.
