News Archive

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) awarded Nicholas Peppas the Professional Impact Award for Mentoring during its annual meeting.

A transformational investment will ease the financial burden for generations of students beginning their journey as engineers at The University of Texas at Austin. Cockrell School of Engineering alumnus Michael Linford, and his wife, Erika, have created a scholarship endowment to support high-potential Texas Engineering students who are Pell Grant-eligible.

Bob Metcalfe, professor emeritus in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, was named the recipient of the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet.

Researchers behind discoveries that led to vaccines for the virus that causes COVID-19 have identified a potential Achilles heel that exists in all coronaviruses. These findings, led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, could aid the development of improved treatments for COVID-19 and also protect against existing and emerging coronaviruses.

Space debris expert and Texas Engineer Moriba Jah has earned the rare honor of being elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Scotland’s National Academy. RSE elected 91 total fellows for 2023, but only six from outside the United Kingdom.

As the world's attention has turned back to space travel in recent years, logistics questions about how to pull off long missions, and maybe even someday life on other planets, have popped up. And researchers around the world are starting to look at taking the burgeoning field of biomanufacturing – the use of engineered biological systems to create products – to space to support the idea of space-bound populations.

A research team from The University of Texas at Austin is part of a new program that aims to take the initial steps to mitigate risks associated with manufacturing capabilities that rely on biological processes in space. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biomanufacturing: Survival, Utility, and Reliability beyond Earth (B-SURE) program will address foundational scientific questions to determine how well industrial biomanufacturing microorganisms can perform in space conditions.

Texas Engineers are leading a multi-university research team that will build technology and tools to improve measurement of important climate factors by observing atoms in outer space. 

They will focus on the concept of quantum sensing, which use quantum physics principles to potentially collect more precise data and enable unprecedented science measurements.

Today's state-of-the-art optical imaging technologies can help us see biological dynamics occurring at subcellular resolutions. However, this capability is primarily limited to thin biological samples, such as individual cells or thin tissue-sections and falls apart when it comes to capturing high-resolution, three-dimensional images of thicker and more complex biological tissue. This limitation occurs because tissue is composed of heterogeneous arrangements of densely-packed cells, which scatter light and hinder optical imaging. This is especially a challenge in live tissue, where biological dynamics occurring within the tissue further diffuse light and scuttle images.

Scientists have called for a legally-binding treaty to ensure Earth’s orbit isn’t irreparably harmed by the future expansion of the global space industry.

In the week that nearly 200 countries agreed to a treaty to protect the High Seas after a 20-year process, the experts believe society needs to take the lessons learned from work to preserve Earth’s oceans and apply them to the planet’s orbit. Writing in the journal Science, an international collaboration of experts in the fields of satellite technology and ocean plastic pollution argue for the urgent need for global consensus on how best to govern Earth’s orbit.

Two-dimensional semiconductors have a chance to galvanize significant advances in electronic device capabilities, replacing silicon-based chips. However, many problems continue to hold back these devices.

 A major problem is carrier mobility, or how fast electrons can move through the semiconductors. These 2D semiconductors are notoriously slow in this area, limiting the ability for improvements and real-world applications.