The National Science Foundation (NSF) selected 35 students from The University of Texas at Austin – including 11 from the College of Natural Sciences – for its prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships Program, giving UT Austin the 12th highest number of NSF graduate fellows in the country in 2015.
In the College of Natural Sciences’ student community, about one in every 10 learners is here to pursue a graduate degree.
Dozens of students gathered at the McCombs School of Business this week to pitch their innovations to investors at the Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition. College of Natural Sciences (CNS) graduate students were among the groups presenting their inventions.
With the most recent Fields Medal, the major award for math, going to a woman for the first time, more attention than usual has been on the under-representation of women in math graduate programs. The American Mathematical Society found that on average 22.5 percent of Ph.D. math students in Group I (top-tier) math departments are women. However, at UT Austin, which has a Group I department, an increasing share of the math graduate students are women. They include Maja Taskovic, a fifth-year graduate student, and her sister Milica Taskovic, a first-year graduate student. Today, 32 percent of all UT Austin math graduate students are women, and in the new 2014 cohort that Milica belongs to, women make up 43 percent of Ph.D. candidates.
Kidnappings. Guerillas. Impenetrable jungle. The Darien Gap is famous for many things. This 60-mile-wide swath of rainforest straddling the Panama-Colombia border has long been the stomping ground of drug traffickers and guerillas, most notably the left-wing FARC, who until 10 years ago were still conducting high-profile kidnappings of foreign travellers seeking to tackle this notoriously dangerous part of the world. Flash forward a decade and scientists working just outside the gap discovered that, while there were still occasional reports of violence, things were now relatively peaceful in the gap.
Harrington Fellowship Supports Three Natural Sciences Graduate Students
Three winners of the university's most prestigious fellowship program, the Donald D. Harrington Fellows Program, are currently working in the College of Natural Sciences. The three graduate students—from California Institute of Technology, Georgia State and The University of Texas at Austin—are researching how planets form beyond our solar system, how our brains make associations between rewards and the environments in which we get them, and how corals respond and adapt to changes in their environment.
Jacob Heiling (BS '13) was already interested in biology when he started working as a greenhouse assistant at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory (BFL) as an undergraduate. The time he spent watching butterflies interact in the greenhouse sparked his interest in studying species interactions, and that led to an independent research project on the chemical ecology of bird-dispersed fruits.
DNA samples from North Americans who lived more 1,000 years ago in Illinois reveal that rapid cultural changes came from acceptance of new practices rather than from a population influx into the region, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Austin and Indiana University.
The College of Natural Sciences is launching a home for its current and future programs in innovative undergraduate science education, the Texas Institute for Discovery Education in Science (TIDES). TIDES was proposed in the CNS 2013 Strategic Plan (as the Texas Center for Science Discovery) as a way to continue and enhance the college’s leading role in STEM education.
The Department of Chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences has received two grants, totaling more than $2.5 million, to help recruit, retain and support graduate and post-doctoral students from groups that are under-represented in the sciences.
Read our publication, The Texas Scientist, a digest covering the people and groundbreaking discoveries that make the College of Natural Sciences one of the most amazing and significant places on Earth.
