News Archive

Woodrow W. Winchester, III, an expert in engineering professional development and continuing education, has been named the new executive director of Texas Engineering Executive Education (TxEEE) in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. TxEEE provides for-credit graduate degrees and continuing education programs for working professionals. Winchester begins on July 1, 2022.

The Federal Transportation Administration (FTA) is advancing a project to use electric buses as mobile backup generators to make sure critical infrastructure like hospitals and fire stations are available during disasters and severe weather events. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have been working on this concept for several years, a project the research team calls Bus Exportable Power Supply (BEPS). And they showed its potential last year when they used a bus to power a building at UT’s Pickle Research Campus in north Austin.

Blood pressure is one of the most important indicators of heart health, but it’s tough to frequently and reliably measure outside of a clinical setting. For decades, cuff-based devices that constrict around the arm to give a reading have been the gold standard. But now, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University have developed an electronic tattoo that can be worn comfortably on the wrist for hours and deliver continuous blood pressure measurements at an accuracy level exceeding nearly all available options on the market today.

The University of Texas at Austin has named Lydia Contreras as its new vice provost for faculty diversity, equity and inclusivity, effective immediately. Contreras, who currently holds the Jim and Barbara Miller Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Chemical Engineering, has served for the past two years as the managing director of diversity in the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost.

Three faculty members of The University of Texas at Austin, including Mitchell Pryor from the Cockrell School of Engineering, have received 2022-2023 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Pryor, Paola Canova and Catherine Weaver will conduct research and/or teach abroad during the 2022-2023 academic year, thanks to the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. Annually, more than 800 U.S. scholars, artists and professionals from all backgrounds teach or conduct research overseas through the program.

With a goal to increase opportunity for those historically underserved by higher education, The University of Texas at Austin and 19 of the nation’s top research universities will form the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities. The 20 universities represent every university that has been both categorized as R1 (very high research activity) by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education.

Several years ago, a promising therapeutic using stem cell factor (SCF) emerged that could potentially treat a variety of ailments, such as ischemia, heart attack, stroke and radiation exposure. However, during clinical trials, numerous patients suffered severe allergic reactions and development of SCF-based therapeutics stopped.

A research team led by engineers at The University of Texas at Austin has developed a related therapeutic that they say avoids these major allergic reactions while maintaining its therapeutic activity. The keys to the discovery, published recently in Nature Communications, were the use of a similar, membrane-bound version of SCF delivered in engineered lipid nanocarriers.

What do you get when you cross a geologist and a mathematician? A rock physicist of course. No that's not some kind of cheesy joke that flew over your head; it's the background of Zoya Heidari. She grew up hiking with her family, and her geologist dad had a habit of picking up random rocks off the trail and listing off everything he knew about them, which was a lot.

Even though consumers won’t see it for years, researchers around the world are already laying the foundation for the next generation of wireless communications, 6G. An international team led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin has developed components that will allow future devices to achieve increased speeds necessary for such a technological jump.

Mimicking the human body, specifically the actuators that control muscle movement, is of immense interest around the globe. In recent years, it has led to many innovations to improve robotics, prosthetic limbs and more, but creating these actuators typically involves complex processes, with expensive and hard-to-find materials. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State University have created a new type of fiber that can perform like a muscle actuator, in many ways better than other options that exist today. And, most importantly, these muscle-like fibers are simple to make and recycle.