Dan Jaffe, vice president for research at UT, will introduce the inaugural Pop-Up Institutes, and UT faculty Institute leaders will describe their goals.  Campus faculty, staff and student researchers attending the Town Hall may contribute their perspectives to the new Institutes, and will be given opportunity to explore the possibility of further collaborations with the Institute teams.

The Pop-Up Institutes consist of UT Austin interdisciplinary teams that will spend the upcoming academic year preparing for a burst of activity focused on a specific area of research. These Institutes will then ‘Pop Up’ for one month — longer than an academic conference, but less than a dedicated research center or program. The Institutes will engage the UT community in collaborative and scholarly dialogue through activities including a hackathon, symposia, and a digital humanities training institute, all within the framework of an interdisciplinary network of national and internationally renowned researchers.

The 2016-2017 Institutes are:

• Seeing the Tree and the Forest: Understanding Individual and Population Variation in Biology, Medicine, and Society
  
  • Institute Leader
    Hans Hofmann, Professor, Department of Integrative Biology, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, College of Natural Sciences
• Discrimination and Population Health Disparities
  
  • Institute Leader
    Stephen Russell, Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor in Child Development, Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, Priscilla Pond Flawn Child and Family Laboratory (PPFCFL), School of Human Ecology
• DH@UT: Building a Digital Humanities Ecosystem for Innovative Research in the Liberal Arts
  
  • Institute Leader
    Tanya Clement, Assistant Professor, School of Information