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Alex Wild manages the Biodiversity Center and Integrative Biology Department's Entomology Collection, which houses 2 million specimens of insects, including the world's largest collection of cave-dwelling invertebrates. The collections are focused on Texas and Mexico, with smaller holdings from Trinidad, the Galápagos Islands and elsewhere. A skilled photographer, Wild also oversees Insects Unlocked, a public domain photography project.

With a flash of light, neuroscientists can now turn individual brain cells on or off. They do so using a set of tools, pioneered in part by UT Austin neuroscientist Boris Zemelman, called optogenetics.

From baseball to financial investing, from elections to oil drilling, analyzing data quickly to predict future outcomes is transforming industries and activities around the world.

A University of Texas at Austin professor and her team were honored with a prestigious SXSW Interactive Innovation Award for the MasSpec Pen, a device that will allow surgeons to identify cancerous tissue in seconds.

Jaimie Davis, assistant professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, studies the effectiveness of school gardening programs in low-income, primarily Hispanic areas.

Matthew Landry is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and the Delegate at Large for Students at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the world's largest organization of food and nutrition professionals.

Jonathan Sessler was a college student when he was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Fortunately, he was also a chemistry major. After surviving radiation therapy, relapsing and then surviving extremely high doses of what he calls "rat poison" (a.k.a. chemotherapy), his oncologist challenged him: "You're a chemist. Find new cancer drugs."

The city's only known year-round resident peregrine falcon is getting a global audience. The bird, nicknamed Tower Girl, lives atop the University of Texas at Austin Tower and has a handful of avid fans who love to watch one of the world's fastest animals dive through the skies above campus. And now, UT's Biodiversity Center has launched a live-streaming webcam so that viewers around the world can observe everyone's favorite local raptor in real time.

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. 

Textiles and apparel senior Katherine Kykta was selected as a Youth Mentoring Association Fashion Scholarship Fund award-winner.