Jennifer Adair's work focuses on the connection between agency and discrimination in the learning experiences of young children and how we can engage young children in authentic learning experiences about race, community and their real lives.
Owen Anderson is a scholar whose expertise is in oil and gas, particularly with regards to international petroleum law, transactions, and taxation. He has written extensively on water law and domestic and global petroleum law.
Janine Barchas' interests include 18th-century literature and culture, digital humanities, the British novel, book history, textual studies, and Jane Austen.
Jean Barrera is a working musician who also teaches the music and history of Conjunto music. He has performed around the world and is the innovator of the first National Reso-phonic Bajo Sexto.
Thorsten Becker's research interests are in geodynamics and seismology, focusing on how planets' interior and surface systems have co-evolved. His team integrates field, laboratory, analog, and numerical approaches into geodynamical models, focusing on the physics of plate tectonics, from grain-scale deformation to earthquakes and global mantle flow.
Patrick Bixler's research focuses on climate and environmental governance, urban sustainability and resilience, hazard preparedness and response, and network science. He is particularly interested in how public, private and nonprofit institutions collaborate to solve complex social and environmental problems and promote social innovation.
Bayani Cardenas' research group studies fundamental and applied hydrologic flow and transport phenomena. The group pursues basic knowledge on the role of water in many earth-surface processes, including conventional hydrologic and water quality monitoring, geophysical surveys, remote-sensing, analogue experiments, and mathematical modeling, to design solutions to environmental issues and society's water problems.
Julia Clarke's research focuses on using phylogenetic methods and diverse data types to gain insight into the evolution of birds, avian flight and the co-option of the flight stroke for underwater diving. She is particularly interested in understanding shared patterns and potential causal factors in the evolution of living bird lineages.
Rhonda Evans studies public law and comparative politics, with an emphasis on Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Her research lies at the intersection of law and politics, paying special attention to issues concerning human rights, discrimination, and asylum seekers.
Shiv Ganesh studies communication and collective organizing in the context of globalization and digital technologies. His work spans critical-institutional and poststructural approaches to communication, and is currently comprised of two strands; studies of technological transformations in collective action; and studies of dialogue, conflict and social change.
Francisco Gonzalez-Lima's lab focuses on the mission to prevent neurocognitive and emotional disorders, understand the underlying brain mechanisms, and advance innovative non-invasive treatments. Areas of research interest include transcranial infrared brain stimulation, near infrared spectroscopy, neurocognitive enhancement, mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase, dementia, bipolar disorder and neurotherapeutics.
Alan Groves's research interest is in assessing heart function and growth using echocardiography and magnetic resonance imaging. Groves is passionate about applying ultrasound technologies to improve care, and he has implemented targeted neonatal echocardiography and point-of-care ultrasound techniques in multiple institutions, with a focus on adherence to agreed protocols and robust quality assurance.
Earth and Planetary Sciences, Institute for Geophysics
Sean Gulick focuses on geophysical imaging at nested resolutions and scientific drilling to examine impact cratering, tectonic processes, climate interactions, catastrophism in the geologic record, and planetary habitability. Current foci are the Chicxulub K-Pg impact and terrestrial craters, impact hydrothermal systems and planetary habitability, Lunar/Martian geophysics, tectonic hazards, and hi-res imaging for sedimentary climate records.
Luc Lavier's research focuses on the structural and geodynamical evolution of continental and oceanic rifts. He has developed techniques to model tectonic processes on crustal and lithospheric scales, using geophysical and geological data to constrain and quantify tectonic processes. These different studies led to the development of parametrizations to understand phenomena like localization of deformation and the initiation of subduction.
Risto Miikkulainen’s research focuses on biologically-inspired computation such as neural networks and evolutionary computation. His goal is to understand biological information processing and to develop intelligent artificial systems that learn and adapt by observing and interacting with the environment.
Mark O'Reilly's research focuses on the functional assessment and treatment of severe challenging behavior and interventions to promote generalization and maintenance of skills with children with autism and developmental disabilities. He has a strong interest in working with culturally diverse populations and examining how behavioral interventions must adapt to be respectful and supportive of diversity.
David Paydarfar's research seeks to understand mechanisms underlying disease states associated with abnormal behavior of neural oscillators such as apnea, circadian dysrhythmias and epilepsy, as well as the coordination of pacemakers with other physiological and behavioral functions.
Katherina Payne researches civic education, early childhood and elementary education, and teacher education to examine the role of relationships, community, and justice to make classrooms democratic and equitable spaces.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Ellen Rathje's research is focused on evaluating seismic hazards related to earthquake ground shaking and earthquake-induced ground failure due to slope failures and liquefaction. Rathje's group uses a wide range of approaches and tools, including computational simulation, statistical analysis, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Integrative Biology, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Michael Ryan's research focuses on animal behavior. Most of Ryan's work has addressed sexual selection and communication in frogs and fish. Ryan is especially interested in integrating an understanding of the mechanisms of communication involved in mate attraction with the evolutionary consequences of sexual selection.
William Schwartz has conducted research on biological clocks and especially on the "master" brain clock in the mammalian hypothalamus. At the Dell Medical School, he is working on the development of interdisciplinary courses at the intersection of biology and medicine for UT Austin undergraduates and the approach to patients with neurological disease for Dell Med students and residents.
Jonathan Sessler's research expertise is focused on organic chemistry, texaphyrin, expanded porphyrins, anion recognition, drug development, anti cancer agents, and the technical analyses of patents.
Timothy Shanahan’s research group uses a combination of geochemical and stable isotopic proxy reconstructions of past climate along with climate model simulations to understand past and future climate change. The focus is the use of organic geochemical and stable isotopic techniques applied to marine, lacustrine and terrestrial sediment records to understand changes on time scales ranging from interannual to millennial, and orbital to tectonic.
Information, Risk, and Operations Management, Statistics and Data Sciences
Thomas Shively's research interests include time series regression models, nonparametric regression models, model selection, hierarchical Bayes models, marketing research and the statistical analysis of air pollution data.
Sara Toynbee's research examines how recognition, measurement, and disclosure issues in financial accounting influence the usefulness of financial reports. She also has research that examines the determinants and consequences of the matching process in the executive labor market.
Jamie Warner's research focuses on the next generation of nanostructured materials with unique properties that will impact electronic, opto-electronic, and energy applications. The core foundation of his research is on the atomic level structure and dynamics of nanomaterials realized through state-of-the-art aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy and spectroscopy.
Karen Willcox's research focuses on producing scalable computational methods for design of next-generation engineered systems, with a particular focus on model reduction as a way to learn principled approximations from data and on multifidelity formulations to leverage multiple sources of uncertain information.
Christine Williams' research focuses on gender, race, and class inequality in the workplace, including men and women in nontraditional occupations, persistent gender discrimination at work, sexuality and sexual harassment in a wide variety of workplace settings, and inequality in low wage retail work.