2020 Issue

What can I say about the past year — and about the unprecedented challenges society has faced — that hasn’t already been said? The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken our spirits and transformed our lives, but it has also revealed extraordinary resilience and creativity.

The University of Texas’ fingerprints are all over the rise in competitive videogaming, aka esports, as a college sport. Texas has one of the oldest esports communities in academia — its flagship group Longhorn Gaming has won more than $100,000 in scholarship funds and recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Brimming with breakthrough research, awards and honors, student innovations and tons more, every year in the Cockrell School of Engineering is one to remember. And — even as the coronavirus pandemic turned the world on its head — 2020 has certainly been no different.

Two years ago, in fall 2018, there were close to 3.2 million students in the U.S. enrolled in fully remote post-high school classes, representing roughly 17 percent of all students at that level. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic flipped this ratio, forcing the vast majority of students into virtual classrooms and bringing remote learning to the mainstream of traditional education.

With students studying virtually and faculty lecturing from home, the engineering corridor of campus is quiet. But the energy at the construction site of our newest engineering building is as lively as ever. The foundation is set, walls are in place, windows have been installed – progress at the Gary L. Thomas Energy Engineering building charges ahead.

From humble beginnings to running the nation’s top pet destination, Cockrell School alumnus Sumit Singh has enjoyed an exceptional career marked by perseverance and integrity — two important characteristics of a leader. In early fall, Sumit sat down with us to share his thoughts on leadership, business and what it really means to be a Texas Engineer.

The world learned on October 9, 2019, that John Goodenough had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to the development of the lithium-ion battery. It was headline-making news not only for the award itself and for the breakthrough it was honoring, but also because, at 97 years old, Goodenough became the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize. But the story of Goodenough’s Nobel experience didn’t end that day. There were months of interviews, events, appearances and more, culminating in the royal ceremonies in Stockholm in December.

Engineers across all disciplines in the Cockrell School are applying their expertise to the problem in any way possible. Nearly eight months since the pandemic took hold in the U.S., an ever-growing cadre of research projects have been funded and are on track to produce something to improve the quality of care and life during this COVID era.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., one of the most immediate needs that arose was filling a shortage of PPE for health care workers. So, inside the Cockrell School’s Texas Inventionworks studio, engineers immediately galvanized into action to create customized 3D-printed masks.

It has been almost a year since Diana Marculescu — a renowned expert in energy-aware computing and a former faculty member and researcher at Carnegie Mellon University — began her tenure as the chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT.

Navid Saleh has dedicated years of his career to helping native populations across the U.S. manage and improve the quality of their water. It started in 2012 when he visited the Navajo Nation, and he later expanded this mission to help Texas border communities.

Launched earlier this year in the Engineering Education and Research Center under the new leadership of Van Truskett, executive director, and Ashley Jennings, managing director, the new Texas Innovation Center primarily aims to guide entrepreneurs, faculty members and graduate students through the process of commercialization, which includes turning startup ideas into successful businesses poised to thrive in a global economy.

On October 13, 2020, Blue Origin — the spaceflight company formed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2000 — celebrated the 13th successful consecutive launch of its New Shepard vehicle, taking another step forward in its mission to lower the cost of access to space through reusable spacecraft and rocket engines that can take people and payloads to space, then to orbit, and finally to the moon and beyond.

The journey from an idea, to funding, to experimentation and to publishing a paper can be a long one. But in many cases, that’s really just the beginning. Along the way, researchers face a variety of important decisions, chief among them, whether to license their technology to a company, as John Goodenough did with his latest battery discovery, or take on the challenge of building a startup of their own.

It was 1970, and America was on the heels of one of its most significant decades in recent history. With the landmark installment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender or national origin was outlawed.

Growing up, the dinner table talk in Mark Papermaster’s (B.S. ECE 1982) family gravitated toward science – what seems like an unconventional topic of conversation until you find out his father, Dr. Ben Papermaster, was a noted cancer researcher and a nascent leader in the field of immunology.

Where Longhorns once played basketball, robots now play soccer. Where teams of athletes once worked together on the court, teams of engineers and scientists now collaborate on next-generation robotics. The newly renovated Anna Hiss Gymnasium is now home to an ever-growing UT Robotics umbrella where humanoid, autonomous, rehabilitation and other robots are being developed, programmed and tested as we prepare for a world where these machines become even more present in our everyday lives.

On March 13, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic sent UT students home packing. The remainder of the spring semester would be spent online, distanced from their peers and professors and faced with a new, unexpected challenge: social isolation. But Texas Engineering students Aditi Merchant and Allen Zhou confronted this challenge head on. Alongside Allen’s brother Anthony, a high school senior at the Texas Academy of Math and Science, they spent their extended spring break developing Big and Mini, a platform that connects youth (Minis) and senior citizens (Bigs) virtually to create mutually beneficial connections and combat loneliness.