THIS YEAR SO FAR
By Natalie Guerra
2025 was another incredible year at the Cockrell School, chock-full of big milestones, bold innovations and Texas Engineering moments that moved the world forward.
🎉 A New Home for Texas Engineers
The Autry C. Stephens Engineering Discovery Building, opening in 2026, will be the third new engineering facility in a decade.
Long-time partner Emerson is getting in on the action at the Autry C. Stephens Engineering Discovery Building and our new semiconductor master's degree program.
Get an inside look at how students learn in, and frequently out of, the classroom in our class feature series.
We sent another class of courageous engineers into the world to do big things:
Commencement speaker and Wi-Fi pioneer Edgar Figueroa delivered a message of dedication, possibilities and connectivity. 😉
Charles Corley became the Cockrell School’s oldest Ph.D. graduate at 78!
This year’s Outstanding Scholar Leader is biomedical engineering graduate Gabriela Nomura.
A new quantum science and technology program for graduate students is on the way.
AI underpinned
several research breakthroughs, including materials to keep buildings cool; new tutoring programs; heart diagnostics; art restoration; and chip design.
Interdisciplinary projects reached across departments, colleges, and disciplines to get the work done:
- UT and partners from the University of Southampton, the University of Edinburgh and Texas A&M Forest Service advanced to the semifinals of the $5 million XPrize wildfire contest.
- Texas Engineers are part of a multi-institutional team investigating the long-term impacts of California wildfires.
- A new Pharmacoengineering graduate program brings together engineering and pharmaceutical sciences, training students to design personalized treatments.
- A collaboration between engineering and dance used wearable sensors to track a performer’s movements in real-time and project the data for audiences to witness.
- Texas Engineer Lydia Contreras teamed up with renowned poet Christian Bök to encode poetry into a “deathless bacterium.”
- Cockrell researchers teamed up with Texas A&M and Purdue University students to prove Al models can get “brain rot” off junk content, gathering evidence to support the future of effective large language model training.
Once again, the Cockrell School ranks among the top undergraduate and graduate engineering programs in the country.
The first woman
to become a licensed professional engineer in Texas is also a Texas Engineer. Leah Moncure was honored by her hometown of Bastrop earlier this year.
Give students access to immersive flight experiences—everything from passenger plane excursions to simulated mars landings.
We found out why headphone batteries don’t last.
Texas Engineers garnered attention in Texas and beyond for their contributions to their field:
- Recent electrical and computer engineering grad Siddharth Thakur and his fire-resistant, hazard-detecting robot were featured on CNN’s Tech For Good.
- Transportation engineer Kara Kockelman served as a leading expert on the impact of autonomous robotaxis, including appearances in The New York Times, Reuters, The Verge.
- Nanshu Lu’s electronic tattoo technology made a major leap this year and the world noticed. Her e-tattoos to measure mental load (BBC) and dehydration (Fox) both made headlines.
CREDIT: REUTERS/Leah Millis
More Texas Engineering students
will get to study abroad thanks to a transformational investment from alumnus and former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Innovative engineering was once again at the forefront of medical research and breakthroughs
including new ultrasound technology for drug delivery, previously unknown insights into bone aging and a breakthrough in treating whooping cough.
Our partnership with Portugal continues.
A new LED treatment that blasts cancer cells and spares healthy ones is the newest in a long series for research breakthroughs through this partnership.
Another year of top academic honors and prizes for Texas Engineers:
- Chemical engineers took home the Hill Prize from the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology
- Drug delivery pioneer Nicholas Peppas added several more honors to his long list of awards, including the Kabiller Prize from Northwestern University.
- Five Texas Engineers were elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest honors in the field.
- Four Cockrell students named Amazon AI Ph.D. Fellows.
- Nine Cockrell faculty members are among the most cited researchers on the planet.
- Mechanical engineering graduate students won top honors in the 2025 Collegiate Inventors Competition for their device that pulls clean drinking water straight from humidity in the air.
After the Texas Longhorns' thrilling victory over the Aggies this Thanksgiving
Texas A&M Engineering dean Robert Bishop donned the Burnt Orange to pay off a bet with our own Dean Roger Bonnecaze.
Keep up with Cockrell
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