Portrait of Sabah Jamal and Leslie McMaster

Connecting Across Generations

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…

Boston Dynamics Robot walks down the sidewalk with group of people including Army men and researchers behind

Where Robots Roam

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…

Mark Papermaster portrait

Know the Questions—and Help Find the Answers

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…

UT Tower in 1970s

The Courage to Change

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,…

Edison lightbulb

Commercializing Breakthroughs

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…

Blue Origin New Glenn spacecraft

To the Moon and Back…and Back Again

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…

Van Truskett and Ashley Jennings

A Quick Change of Plans

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,…

Image of two people scaling a glacier in Antarctica

Texas Engineers in Alaska

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…

Diana Marculescu portrait

The Right Time. The Right Place.

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…

Scott Evans holds a version a 3D printed mask

Custom Fit

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…