Richard Albert's research interests are constitutionalism, democracy, and the rule of law, with specific focus on constitutional reform, constitution-making, and comparative constitutionalism.
Andres Almanzan is a respected researcher in finance and investment strategy, with published papers on financial structure, firm success, investment strategy, and the labor market.
Journalism and Media, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Rosental Alves' research focuses on international reporting (emphasizing the work of foreign correspondents), journalism in Latin America (especially the struggle for a free press in the hemisphere), and Internet journalism (the creation of a new genre of journalism for the digital medium).
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Francisca Aroso is an expert at digital fabrication, including 3D printing and computerized numeric control, computational design, digital simulations and visualizations.
Doris Baker's research interest is to develop and test interventions that improve the outcomes of English learners using evidence-based practices and technology. She is also interested in the development of formative assessments that can measure student academic growth, the examination of the effect of parental support on their children’s academic outcomes, and the enhancement of teacher pedagogical practices and content knowledge.
Miriam Barquero Molina is a field geologist, who, although trained as a more traditional structural geologist, describes herself as a generalist with interests spanning structural geology, tectonics, and hard-rock geology. She has taught field courses across the western U.S., Chile, and Spain.
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.
Mark Bierner's research is in the area of plant systematics focusing of the evolution and classification of species in the sunflower family Asteraceae.
Germanic Studies, Linguistics, Linguistics Research Center
Hans C. Boas' main research revolves around the relationship between syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, and the structure of the lexicon, which he approaches from a contrastive perspective (English/German). The theoretical frameworks he works with are primarily Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics with a strong bias towards corpus-based research methods.
Pascale Bos' research focuses on Holocaust and Genocide Studies with a special emphasis on gender and memory, sexual violence and war, and the after effects of trauma and wartime violence. Bos is also interested in the study of autobiography as well as modern Dutch and Jewish literature & culture.
Daniel Breecker is interested in pursuing a process-based understanding of the critical zone with a focus on the formation of calcium carbonates in soils and caves and the stabilization of organic carbon in soils. His research goals include improving and developing paleoclimate proxies and better understanding changes in climate and the carbon cycle across a range of timescales.
Nathaniel Brickens is an internationally acclaimed trombone player and educator. He has traveled and performed both national and internationally as a free-lance trombonist, as conductor of the UT Trombone Choir, and as a music educator.
Audrey Brumback's research involves a diverse array of approaches such as optogenetics, calcium imaging, behavioral assays, and patch clamp electrophysiology to understand how the brain's circuitry differs in neurodevelopmental conditions like autism. As a pediatric neurology physician-scientist, Dr. Brumback's long-term goal is to develop therapies to improve the lives of people with autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.
Elena Cáceres is a theoretical physicist working in string theory and gravity. She has worked in different aspects of gauge/gravity duality, supergravity solutions and holography. Her work is focused on the relationship between quantum information theory, gravity, and spacetime.
John Clarke's research focuses on ancient Roman art, art-historical methodology, and contemporary art. Since 2005, he has directed the Oplontis Project, based in Torre Annunziata, Italy, whose goal is to complete excavation and study of two large ancient Roman villas buried by Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
Alan Covey's research addresses the development and organization of ancient empires, with particular focus on the Incas of Andean South America. He conducts archaeological surveys and excavations to collect data on the rise and fall of the Incas, and works extensively in archives in Peru and Europe to construct a richer understanding of the impact of early modern European expansion in the Andean world.
Penelope Davies specializes in the architectural history of ancient Rome. She has published numerous articles and essays in scholarly publications about Roman art and architecture.
Maria De-Arteaga's research is focused on algorithmic fairness and human-artificial intelligence complementarity. As part of her work, she characterizes how societal biases encoded in historical data may be reproduced and amplified by machine learning models, and develops algorithms to mitigate these risks.
María Luisa Echavarría's research focuses on international business, language and culture, heritage language learners, and Spanish for healthcare providers.
Zachary Elkins’ research focuses on issues of democracy, institutional reform, research methods, and national identity, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America. Much of his research is on the origins and consequences of national constitutions.
William Fagelson's teaching interests focus on engineering communication and senior design projects. Fagelson has worked as a consultant in industry, delivering workshops for engineers in technical communication, and as a copyeditor in electrical engineering, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. His research interests in American Studies include film and media history and World War II veteran readjustment.
Nerea Feliz's research encompasses scholarly and creative activities that are linked forming a cohesive body of work with a sustained focus on public interiority. Situated at the intersection of architecture, interior design and interior urbanism, her work explores interior design's role as a mediator between people, the public spaces occupied, and pressing cultural and political questions.
Irene Gamba's research group focuses on modeling of non-linear, coupled systems arising in the physical and biological sciences, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences. Using classical and statistical analysis, the group addresses model formulation, interpretation, approximation, and assessment along with multiple dimensional spatial and temporal scales, direct and inverse problems, and accurate and efficient approximation algorithms.
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.
Stephanie Grasso investigates neurologically-based communication disorders within the context of bilingualism. She aims to establish the efficacy of treatment approaches for bilingual adults with aphasia and utilizes neuroimaging to investigate variability in treatment responsiveness. Grasso also examines bilingualism as a contributor to cognitive reserve in neurodegenerative disorders affecting language and cognition.
Benjamin Gregg's research focuses on social and political theory, bioethics of human genetic engineering, politics of artificial intelligence, and human rights.
Michael Harney's research focuses on medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature, comparative literature, literary theory, cultural theory, and film studies.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Hillary Hart’s research interests include environmental and risk communication, the social impact of technology, and engineering ethics (especially research ethics). Her objective in pursuing research in environmental risk communication is the development of strategies (rhetorical and otherwise) to ensure productive, interactive communication among engineers, regulators, industry, and the public on environmental issues.
Anthropology, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
John Hartigan is an anthropologist seeking to theorize sociality across species lines by contemplating multispecies perspectives in the field. He has investigated multispecies ethnography with wild horses, looked at the anthropology of science via botany and plant genomics, considered bullfighting in, and examined ethnography of race (theories, methods, and practice, with an attention to cultural articulations of whiteness).
Maya Henry's clinical and research interests are in the nature and treatment of aphasia caused by stroke and neurodegenerative disease. Her research explores cognitive and neural bases of spoken and written language as well as the rehabilitation of language impairments associated with primary progressive aphasia.
Architecture, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Benjamin Ibarra Sevilla's research involves case studies of ancient mason techniques, stereotomy, descriptive geometry, and architectural geometry informed by form-resistant structures.
Robert Jansen studies plant molecular systematics and evolution with a primary focus on comparative genomics of plastids, their utility for understanding genome evolution and phylogenetic relationships of angiosperms, and coevolution between plastid, mitochondrial and nuclear genomes.
Shardha Jogee's research seeks to address central questions on the evolution of galaxies as a function of cosmic epoch, mass, and environment. These include how galaxies grow their stars, black holes, and dark matter halos across cosmic time and vastly different environments, the role played by theoretically predicted growth modes, and how galaxy clusters, some of the largest bound structures in the Universe, form.
Spanish & Portuguese, Marketing, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Orlando Kelm is a linguistics professional whose interests center on the use of language and culture for professional purposes, such as Business Spanish & Portuguese. Kelm's research focuses on the creation of instructional materials, including the use of innovative technologies in foreign language instruction.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Medicine
Kerry Kinney's research examines the relationships between environmental exposures (microorganisms, allergens and chemicals), human health and the built environment, microbiome of the built environment (e.g., schools, homes), development and application of molecular tools for monitoring engineered and natural systems, biological treatment systems for water and wastewater.
Brian Korgel's research centers on the development of new methods for synthesizing nanostructured materials, fabricating devices based upon these materials, and studying their properties. The lab group focuses on investigating size-tunable material properties, and the rational self-assembly and fabrication of nanostructures with atomic detail. This research finds applications in microelectronics and photonics, spintronics, coatings, sensors and
Min Kyung Lee's research investigates the societal implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and how to design AI to be fairer, participatory, and a tool for social good.
Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates material-and-process driven, site-responsive installations. Liu’s sculptural environments resonate with the experience of migration and cultural memory and negotiate personal, cultural, and environmental concerns.
Allan MacDonald’s research interests center on the influence of electron-electron interactions on the electronic properties of metals and semiconductors.
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Neurology
José del R. Millán is an expert in the field of brain-machine interfaces (BMI), especially based on electroencephalogram signals. In addition to his work on the fundamentals of BMI and design of neuroprosthetics, Millán is prioritizing the translation of BMI to end-users who live with motor and cognitive disabilities. In parallel, he is designing BMI technology to offer new interaction modalities for people without disabilities.
Eugenio Miravete's research interests include industrial organization and applied microeconomics with a particular interest to the estimation of models of taxation, regulation, price discrimination, and innovation in oligopolistic industries.
David Mohrig's research focuses on the application of sedimentary deposits and transport processes to unraveling the evolutions of terrestrial and submarine landscapes. He studies the behavior of topography generated at the interface between a granular material and a moving fluid from very short to very long time and space scales, with particular emphasis on processes controlling channel formation, both on land and in the deep ocean.
Pablo Montero-Zamora's research focuses on the influence of context, parents, and peers on Latino youth substance use and mental health. He studies how factors such as cultural stressors, migration, and social norms shape family dynamics, resulting in youth behaviors. His work aims to improve the development, implementation, and evaluation of culturally adapted interventions tailored to serve Latino families in the U.S. and Latin America.
Peter Mueller's research interests are broadly in nonparametric Bayesian inference (BNP), Bayesian adaptive clinical trial design, Bayesian bioinformatics, optimal design and decision problems, and computational methods for Bayesian inference.
Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez's research and teaching focus on the interactions between Indigenous peoples and European empires in the early modern Atlantic world, combining material culture, agrarian history, and the history of books and maps. He also has a keen interest in visual and public history and digital humanities, having published on the history of Colombia's map.
Chiyo Nishida’s research focuses on Spanish morph-syntax. More recently, she has focused on argument realization variation in ditransitive and gustar-type verb constructions. She is also looking into how to teach information structure and word order to intermediate and advanced students of Spanish.
Thomas Palaima has written and taught extensively on the subjects of ancient writing systems, the reconstruction of ancient culture, decipherment theory, Greek language, war and violence, ancient religion and rituals, song as a means of communicating social criticism, and intertextuality.
Desiree Pallais-Downing's research addresses the linguistic and pedagogical contributions of bilingual teacher candidates as part of creating and teaching with informational texts that incorporate the background knowledge and experiences of Latinos in the US. Pallais-Downing is also involved in research and publication initiatives with international scholars from a variety of backgrounds who are associated with the Literacy Research Association.
Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Modern Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery, Pediatrics, Surgery, Medicine
Nikolaos Peppas' research blends modern molecular and cellular biology with engineering to generate next-generation systems and devices, including bio-microelectromechanical systems with enhanced applicability, reliability, functionality and longevity.
Steven Phelps' expertise includes social cognition, perceptual scaling and brain size, signal detection and information theory, neural network models, the evolution of gene regulation, epigenetics and transcription, sexual selection, human evolution and population genetics.
Martin Poenie is interested in the cell biology of T cells and how they carry out their effector functions. In particular, he is researching how signaling events lead to reorganization of the T cell cytoskeleton and translocation of the microtubule organizing center to the site where T cells make contact with an antigenic target cell.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Jorge Prozzi and his research team have ongoing experimental research on testing and behavior of road building materials, such as the design and rehabilitation of pavements, asphalt technology, accelerated pavement testing, and pavement management systems. His research involves mechanistic and empirical design and applications of probability and statistics to pavement engineering problems.
Adam Pyrek is an architect whose work has given him the ability to address the requirements of today’s ever more challenging projects in regards to performance, form, and public scrutiny.
D'Arcy Randall’s research interests include engineering communication, engineering ethics, rhetoric, poetry and poetics, Australian literature, feminist literature, and North American women's poetry.
Cory Reed's research focuses on early modern theatrical performance, including the representation of identity in 16th- and 17th-century literature, literary and cultural responses to the emergence of scientific discourse in early modern Spain, and cognitive cultural studies. His teaching includes studying historical moments of cultural contact in Spain, Mexico, and the American southwest.
Nestor Rodriguez’s research focuses on Guatemalan migration, U.S. deportations to Mexico and Central America, the unauthorized migration of unaccompanied minors, evolving relations between Latinos and African Americans/Asian Americans, and ethical and human rights issues of border enforcement.
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Alexandra Clarà Saracho's research interests are bio-mediated soil processes and sustainable geotechnical engineering practices. Her group combines investigations of microbial processes involved in the formation of calcium carbonate, with the characterisation and physical modeling of bio-geotechnical systems, to further understanding of the relationship between mineral microstructure and the engineering response of carbonate-cemented soils.
Luis Sentis' laboratory focuses on control and experimentation with walking robots and exoskeletons, design of high performance ground systems, and algorithms for active sensing in human environments.
Spanish & Portuguese, African and African Diaspora Studies, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Sandro Sessarego works in contact linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax. He studies Afro-Latino Vernaculars of the Americas (ALVA), languages in Latin America developed from contact of African languages, Spanish and Portuguese in colonial times. His research aims at examining the status of unofficial languages to understand how language policy impact minority groups, with a focus on speakers of ALVA, creoles, indigenous languages, etc.
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.
Daniel Stockli's research focuses on the application of thermochronology and geochronology to tectonic and geological problems to better understand the temporal and thermal aspects of tectonic, petrologic, stratigraphic, and geomorphologic processes. In addition, he investigates geo- and thermochronometry technique development, calibration, and bench marking, with special emphasis on development of new thermochronmeters and novel applications.
William Swann's research examines the relationship between social-cognitive processes and relationships, including both dyadic and group relationships. Much of his research explores the nature and consequences of identity fusion, which occurs when group members experience a sense of union with a group.
Januibe Tejera's work connects contemporary music with oral music traditions, new technology, and theatrical elements, all with an eye toward music as a multi-sensory experience.
Januibe Tejera de Miranda's work connects contemporary music with oral music traditions, new technology, and theatrical elements, all with an eye toward music as a multi-sensory experience.
Susan Thomas is a researcher of Cuban and Latin American music as well as popular music and media. She analyzes performative and mediatized manifestations of and reactions to transnationalism, migration and diaspora, as well as the musical intersections of gender, race, embodiment and performativity.
Laura Villafuerte Altuzar's research interest is in developing numerical and analytical methods for differential equations which consider uncertainty in their coefficients, initial conditions, boundary conditions or source terms. She is also interested in computing the expectation and variance functions of the approximating (analytical) process solution of the equations in order to have a representable statistical idea of the solution process.
Sarah Jey Whitehead's research focuses specifically on the construction of authenticity in the foreign language classroom. Her research makes use of ecological, sociocultural, and critical theories to investigate the construct(ion) of authenticity in the foreign language classroom. She is also interested in curricular design and pedagogical theory, and applies her vast knowledge of educational theory to her continually developing practice.
Christopher Wlezien's research looks at the "thermostatic" model of public opinion and policy and examines the dynamic relationships between preferences for spending and budgetary policy in various domains. Other research considers the broader relationship between news and the public. He also investigates the evolution of voter preferences expressed in pre-election polls over the course of an election cycle.
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