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When Richard Finnell first met her, Rachel was a nine-year-old girl with severe developmental delays. Her condition seemed to be caused by a deficiency in a critical B vitamin called folate. Yet she had plenty of folate circulating in her blood. Somehow it was vanishing before it got to her brain and spine. Eventually Finnell made a surprising discovery. He's now using new genetic tools like CRISPR to better understand her condition and test possible therapies.

​University of Texas students may come to Natural Sciences Week for the space-themed desserts. However, after learning about 3D printers, innovations in neuroscience, and how to succeed in research, they'll want to stay even after the last bites of Moon Pie have vanished. 

In honor of the 100^th anniversary of the first graduate student earning a degree at UT Austin and our new Discovery Fellows campaign, we're launching a series of posts to introduce you to current graduate students from across the College of Natural Sciences.

The Department of Chemistry will soon have a new department chair. Theoretical chemist Dave Thirumalai, whose research focuses on biophysics, chemical physics, soft matter, and system biology, will assume the role in early January 2016.

University of Texas at Austin scientists say there's a simple way for home gardeners and small farmers to give plants a pesticide-free boost: by harnessing the power of often helpful bacterial communities known as the microbiomes of plants.

The University of Texas at Austin will receive a $2.4 million grant over the next five years from the National Institute on Aging to study how social interactions improve the health of older adults. Participants will use wearable electronic devices and cellphone apps to monitor their physical activity and social interactions in real time for several days.

Amira, Amier, and Layla Haidar do everything together. These triplets, all new students in the College of Natural Sciences, are all majoring in biochemistry. They also all live together, cook together, have the same class schedules and flag football team, and are close with each other's friends.

Assistant professor and astronomer Steve Finkelstein can travel through time. Well, almost. He uses data from the Hubble Space Telescope to gaze beyond to the most distant galaxies in the universe. He studies galaxy evolution, and is on a quest to discover the origins of our Milky Way and life itself.

​As part of a continuing tradition, we invited faculty, staff and students in the College of Natural Sciences community to send us images this past spring that celebrated the magnificent beauty of science and the scientific process. Our goal was to find those moments where science and art become one and the same.