News

​The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today the early-career researchers across the U.S. and Canada who are recipients of the 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship, including three UT Austin faculty members in the College of Natural Sciences: Greg Durrett, Sam Raskin and Hang Ren.

Rachel Ward, professor of mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science, or TRIPODS, Phase II award. The award will help establish The Institute for Emerging CORE Methods in Data Science (EnCORE), led by the University of California San Diego in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles; University of Pennsylvania; and UT Austin.

Maggie Miller, a UT Austin alumna in mathematics who will soon return to join the faculty, has been awarded a Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, an early career award for women in mathematics that is part of the annual Breakthrough Prizes. She is being honored for her work on fibered ribbon knots and surfaces in 4-dimensional manifolds.

Rachel Ward was selected as the 2022 recipient of the Peter O'Donnell Distinguished Researcher Award by the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

For decades, the number of Black students pursuing STEM degrees has been increasing nationally, but in the 1960s in UT Austin graduate programs, it was a different story. The small group of African Americans pursuing science and math doctoral degrees then were true trailblazers. This month, the College of Natural Sciences learned of the recent passing of one of them, doctoral mathematician Llayron Clarkson, who was 97. In addition to being an alumnus of The University of Texas at Austin's mathematics Ph.D. program, Clarkson was a former top academic leader at Texas Southern University.

When physicists want to explain how subatomic particles—such as electrons, photons, quarks and neutrinos—behave and interact, they use a framework called quantum field theory (QFT). QFT might be the most successful physical theory ever invented. It was used to predict the existence of the Higgs boson, antimatter and neutrinos. And it has predicted the results of particle physics experiments accurately to the highest number of decimal places ever recorded.

Heather Wilber, an NSF postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mathematics who joined the Oden Institute in May 2021, received the 2022 Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM) Dissertation Prize for a study entitled, Computing numerically with rational functions. Although only published earlier this year, it has resulted in multiple papers in scientific journals already, appearing in the SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing, Linear Algebra and its Applications, and Constructive Approximation (to appear).

David Kulpanowski has an important job. As an IT business systems analyst with Austin-Travis County EMS, he's responsible for tracking ambulance response times in the City of Austin and then conducting simulation models to see how they can be improved.

Getting ambulances where they need to be and fast enough is a life-or-death matter.

When Zoe de Beurs arrived at UT Austin, she wasn't sure of what she wanted to do. Now, at the end of her fifth year, she's graduating from the Dean's Scholars honors program as a physics, astronomy and math triple major with an African and African Diaspora Studies minor.

Amanda Hager, an associate professor of instruction in the Department of Mathematics, has been awarded the 2021 Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching, in recognition of her dedication to students. The student body is entirely responsible for the nomination, selection and award processes for the annual award, given exclusively to faculty in the Colleges of Natural Sciences and Liberal Arts.

Philip 'Uri' Treisman, founder and executive director of the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin, has dedicated his career to improving mathematics and science education on a national scale, leading to measurable gains in student performance in these subjects and improvements in course success for elementary school children through university undergraduates. Now he is the recipient of one of the most prestigious awards in American education, the 2020 James Bryant Conant Award from the Education Commission of the States.

Algebra. Mention the word in public and anyone in earshot is likely to run screaming as far from you as possible. Society's mental block when it comes to mathematics is frequently based on a misconception that the kinds of mathematical principles we learn at school - such as algebra – are of little use to us in the real world.

Texans who are college-educated, live in suburban or urban areas, have higher median incomes and are ethnically white are less likely to vaccinate their children, according to analysis by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. The findings could help public health officials identify pockets of low vaccination rates where communities within the state are at higher risk for an outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles.

The American Mathematical Society has named Thomas Chen, chair of the Department of Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin, as one of 52 Fellows of the AMS for 2020. The Fellows of the AMS designation recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics.

University of Texas at Austin professor emerita and Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in Mathematics Karen Uhlenbeck will receive the American Mathematical Society's (AMS) 2020 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement.