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Each year, the American Junior Academy of Science invites the nation's top pre-college researchers to tour a premiere university's campus and meet with the people there who are doing cutting-edge research in scientific labs every day. This year, dozens of high-school scientists-in-training took their tours at The University of Texas at Austin, where they met researchers different from whom they might have expected.

Here, many of the pioneering researchers are only a year or two out of high school themselves. 

Researchers from across the world are coming to Austin this week for one of the most important scientific gatherings of the year — the 2018 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Annual Meeting. Among them are some remarkable undergraduate students from The University of Texas at Austin who will be presenting original research at the conference.

UT Austin alumna Lynne Chantranupong —currently a postdoctoral research fellow in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School—was named as one of the inaugural Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) 2017 Hanna H. Gray Fellows. HHMI is an early-career science award providing up to $1.4 million in financial support, mentoring, and active involvement within the HHMI community during early postdoctoral training through several years of a tenure-track faculty position.

This summer, Rylee Ross, a member of the White Dwarf Stars research stream of the Freshman Research Initiative and her lab-mates visited the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas. Rylee is a second-year physics (space science option) major and the recipient of a 2017 FRI Summer Research Fellowship. After graduation, she hopes to attend graduate school in physics.

Two undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin and their faculty co-authors have won a best paper award from the Association for Computing Machinery. They presented their paper, which focuses on making 3D printing more efficient, at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference on July 18. Their paper was one of two nominated in the Real World Applications category.

In the summer of 1980, Microsoft was a scrappy little company with about 40 employees known mostly for producing computer languages like BASIC and FORTRAN. Annual revenues were just a few million dollars a year. That was all about to change when they got a call from global computer giant IBM. Could they help with a top-secret project to build, in less than a year, an affordable personal computer for ordinary people?

Juan Lozano is a second-year math student at The University of Texas at Austin who participates in the Directed Reading Program, an experiential learning program that matches undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics for projects that deepen students' understanding of high-level mathematical concepts. UT Austin's is the nation's largest and most diverse Directed Reading Program in the country.

Because the College of Natural Sciences is where the groundbreaking Freshman Research Initiative began, we speak to students about their experiences in the program from time to time.

The College of Natural Sciences' Freshman Research Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin received the Gold Award for STEM education and the Silver Award winner for "Presence Learning" in a worldwide competition billed as "the Oscars of Higher Education."

Every year, the College hosts its biggest undergraduate research showcase event, the Undergraduate Research Forum. The best and most innovative of students' scientific posters and explorations are recognized with awards sponsored by the university, faculty, alumni and industry.