BPE News

The engineering industry as a whole has struggled for decades with issues of equity and representation. A new center at The University of Texas at Austin is looking to change that at the academic level by recruiting a more diverse group of students and working closely with universities that serve primarily Hispanic and Black students.

With more students than ever graduating on time, The University of Texas at Austin has been able to expand capacity, admitting its largest-ever incoming class. The university has 9,060 first-time freshmen undergraduates, according to data collected on the 12th class day of this semester. The previous high for the entering first-year class was 8,960 in 2018. Total university enrollment rose 3% over last year from 50,476 to 51,992, which is close to the all-time high of 52,261 set in 2002.

For the first time at UT, student organizations and programs focused on women in STEM fields are coming together in a formal group led by the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Women in Engineering Program (WEP). The Women in STEM Leadership Collaborative includes 1,000+ women from 24 organizations across engineering and sciences at UT to collaborate, share resources and participate in leadership development opportunities, mentorship programs and other activities.

A national network of women deans, chairs and distinguished faculty in biomedical engineering, including from the Cockrell School of Engineering, called upon the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other major funding agencies to address disparities in allocating support for Black researchers.

The University of Texas at Austin is participating in a three-and-a-half-year collaborative project with top research universities to increase the number of underrepresented minority faculty members in mathematics, physical and earth sciences, and engineering (MPESE) fields at research universities.

The University of Texas at Austin has earned the prestigious Seal of Excelencia, which is granted to a small group of colleges and universities committed to accelerating Latino student success. UT Austin is one of just five institutions to receive the seal this year from Excelencia in Education, the nation’s authority in efforts related to Latino student success. It is one of 14 institutions to receive the seal since it was introduced in 2019 — and one of only two members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), which represents the nation’s premier research universities.

What makes you an engineer? Your engineering identity plays a vital role in your future work and studies. And it’s probably influenced by your gender. We all carry many identities: father, son, daughter, sister, niece, nurse, friend, and more. Carolyn Seepersad is many of those things, including an associate professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

Students, faculty, staff and leadership from academic institutions across the U.S., including The University of Texas at Austin, came together this month in a virtual event to share experiences and barriers facing Black scholars in STEM fields. Hosted by the University of Washington, “Experiences of Black STEM in the Ivory: A Call to Disruptive Action” inspired and challenged participants to take action to address racial inequalities in STEM.

Cockrell School of Engineering Dean Sharon L. Wood has named Christine Julien, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Anna and Jack Bowen Professor of Engineering, as the Cockrell School’s assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion — a new position established this year.

Fernanda Leite, associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, was named a fellow of the IAspire Leadership Academy, a leadership program aimed at helping STEM faculty from underrepresented backgrounds ascend to leadership roles at colleges and universities. The program, which is part of the Aspire Alliance’s Institutional Change Initiative, helps address the national need to broaden diversity and increase inclusion in STEM fields and higher education leadership.

Over 35 of the nation’s best and brightest women in computational and data sciences came together on The University of Texas at Austin campus last week to network, collaborate and gain insight into what it takes to build a successful career in research and academia. Hosted by UT’s Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories and the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, the Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences event was an intensive workshop for women graduate students and postdocs who are interested in pursuing academic and research centers.

Growing up in Corpus Christi in the 1960s, Linda Steen Norris found her educational experience in high school to be unchallenging and gender-biased. As a young woman, she was presented with only a limited number of career options, and her potential to excel in STEM fields like engineering and science went unexplored.

Engineer Your World, a high school engineering curriculum and teacher support program operated by UT Austin and developed by experts in the Cockrell School of Engineering, has been named an “Accomplished Program” by STEMworks and selected by the Iowa Governor’s STEM Advisory Council as one of 10 “Scale-Up Programs” to be offered in Iowa-area high schools beginning this fall — two national distinctions that illustrate the program’s extraordinary growth since its launch in 2008.

Earnest F. Gloyna, former dean of The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Engineering (now the Cockrell School of Engineering), died on Jan. 9 at the age of 97, leaving behind a legacy marked by exceptional leadership and vision.

On a Saturday in April, more than 50 high school students in the Houston area came together in small, multi-school teams to apply the engineering tools and techniques they learned in their Engineer Your World courses, developed by Texas Engineering faculty. The challenge for the one-day Solve it by Sunset Design-A-Thon was to create a product that prevents or mitigates flood damage to residential houses in Houston.

The Women in Engineering Program in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin hosted more than 8,000 children, parents and educators from cities across the state for its 16th annual Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day and Girl Day STEM Festival on Feb. 25, 2017, a daylong event filled with activities that help spark creativity, inspire future careers and show how engineers and scientists can change the world. Elementary and middle school students engaged in 150 activities and hands-on educational experiences, from designing a balloon-powered car to watching physics and chemistry in action.

One hundred years ago, the first woman to receive an engineering degree from The University of Texas at Austin graduated. Thirty years after that, the university hired its first female engineering faculty member (who was also the first female professor of electrical engineering in the United States). And forty years later, we established one of the first university-led women in engineering programs in the country and the first in the state of Texas.

If we can change how people perceive engineering, we can create a snowball effect.

Celebrating 50 years of equal opportunity in Engineering at UT

Driven by a passion for helping others, Mamadou Balde has developed a motivational speaking project aimed at benefitting our most underrepresented communities.