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Joydeep Biswas leads the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory (AMRL) at UT, where he and other researchers work on building mobile service robots that assist humans in everyday environments. The lab investigates programs and algorithms that enable these robots to better navigate changing conditions, incorporate human assistance and recover from failures intelligently.

Melissa Kemp, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, studies how extinction, biological diversification and colonization are shaped by environmental upheavals. She joined the faculty as a new hire in 2018, and this fall was announced as the winner of the Environmental Science Institute's Billy Carr Distinguished Teaching Fellowship.

A noted researcher at the intersection of cancer biology, neurodegeneration and epigenetics, Urbain Weyemi is joining the Department of Molecular Biosciences with the help of a recruitment grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). We connected with Weyemi as he makes the move from Johns Hopkins University to The University of Texas at Austin.

Feliciano Giustino recently joined the University of Texas at Austin faculty in the Department of Physics and is a Moncrief Chair in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, where he will direct the Center for Quantum Materials Engineering. He was previously a professor in the Department of Materials at Oxford University.

New faculty in Natural Sciences conduct compelling research and inspire new generations, right out of the gate. As the 2019-20 academic year begins, we are introducing faculty members whose compelling work is worth learning about. Here meet Kami Hull. Within months of joining the faculty, she won a prestigious Novartis Early Career Award in Chemistry in recognition of her research, which involves developing more efficient processes for synthetic organic chemistry.

This summer the Department of Physics welcomed an astrophysicist whom Global Citizen put on a list of the "17 Top Female Scientists who have Changed the World," alongside names like Jane Goodall and Marie Curie.

As a new academic year approaches, we aim to introduce you to some of the scientists and mathematicians in our community, especially faculty who joined our UT community recently. First up: Corwin Zigler, associate professor in UT Austin's Department of Statistics and Data Sciences and in the Dell Medical School's Department of Women's Health.

Alison Preston is the Dr. A. Wilson Nolle and Sir Raghunath P. Mahendroo Professor of Neuroscience in the College of Natural Sciences. She also holds appointments in the in the College of Liberal Arts' department of psychology and the Dell Medical School's department of psychiatry. She spoke with The Texas Scientist about her work. 

Assistant professor of chemistry Livia Eberlin sat down with The Texas Scientist to discuss her work.