University Research Excellence Awards

The University Research Excellence Awards recognize the outstanding efforts of faculty and research staff by presenting three annual awards. These have become one of the most prominent symbols of peer recognition at The University of Texas at Austin, not only for career-long accomplishments and scientific research output but also for creative research and artistic endeavors.

The University Research Excellence Awards program is sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship and Creative Endeavors. The three research awards that recognize outstanding achievement are:

Submission Deadline

Submissions are now closed. Honorees have been notified, and will be recognized at a ceremony in April 2025.

2024 University Research Excellence Award Winners

The University Research Excellence Awards recognize the outstanding efforts of faculty and research staff with three annual awards: the Research Excellence Career Award, the Creative Endeavor Award and the Research Paper Excellence Award. These awards have become one of the most prominent symbols of peer recognition at The University of Texas at Austin, not only for career-long accomplishments and scientific research output but also for creative research and artistic endeavors. The winners are:

• Research Excellence Career Award – Sumit Guha, professor, History, College of Liberal Arts
• Creative Endeavor Award – Lisa B. Thompson, professor, African and African Diaspora Studies, College of Liberal Arts
• Research Paper Excellence Award – Vagheesh Narasimhan, assistant professor, Integrative Biology, College of Natural Sciences

Research Excellence Career Award

The Research Excellence Career Award recognizes sustained outstanding research achievement over many years.

Sumit Guha, who holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History, has spent over four decades researching the economic, political, ecological and cultural histories in both early and modern South Asia. His range of expertise – along with fluency in 12 languages and five scripts – sets Guha apart from his peers, giving him the ability to illuminate important and relevant developments in the subcontinent’s long history.

In his letter supporting Guha’s nomination for the award, Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, professor of anthropology at Yale University, said Guha’s book on the agrarian economy of colonial India, published in 1993, remains the most authoritative discussion of agricultural productivity in 19th century India. And his newest book, “Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900” is the first comprehensive environmental history of early modern India. Dr. Guha “is not just the preeminent historian of South Asia…he is a peerless comparative thinker and polymath,” Sivaramakrishnan wrote.

Recognized internationally for his enduring influence and contributions to the study of South Asian history, Guha's research continues to shape the understanding of historical and contemporary social dynamics across Asia.

See past winners

Creative Endeavor Award

The Creative Endeavor Award recognizes distinct, exceptionally creative work with extraordinary impact and significance to the field of study performed by an established researcher. This award is for a single contribution or a series of creative endeavors.

"The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body," is a choreopoem – a performance art piece that incorporates dance and poetry – that presents Lisa B. Thompson’s research on the health and welfare of Black women in the United States. The show, which focuses primarily on Black women academics and artists who disproportionally experience premature death, reveals that the health disparities Black women and girls experience have not escaped those who are highly educated or successful.

The Black Feminist Guide premiered at The Vortex in Austin in April 2024 along with an installation of journals on the walls so that audience members could write down advice about health and wellness. Premiers also were held at the Pyramid Theatre in Des Moines, Iowa and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco. In Austin Woman’s review of the show, Cy White wrote, "The Black Feminist Guide is one of those plays that come along once in a lifetime…. (It) forces the audience to reckon with their inevitability. More than that, it’s a reminder that we are human, and our humanhood is a blessing; being able to grow old in our human form is a blessing."

See past winners

Research Paper Excellence Award

The Research Paper Excellence Award recognizes extraordinary achievement for the principal or sole author of a peer-reviewed scholarly paper reporting original research.

In "The genetic architecture and evolution of the human skeletal form," published in Science, Vagheesh Narasimhan answers a central question in human evolution: As humans gained the ability to walk upright, what genetic changes underlie the dramatic changes to our skeleton? For many years, this fundamental question was unanswered because it was not possible to link properties of bones to the genes responsible for their evolution. Narasimhan used a novel application of Artificial Intelligence to quantify the skeleton using X-ray images of tens of thousands of individuals. This ground-breaking approach provides, to date, the largest genotype-to-phenotype map of the skeleton in any vertebrate.

Narasimhan’s paper expands understanding of how the human genome radically reshaped biology in the last few million years, and is a game changer for the study, diagnosis and treatment of musculoskeletal diseases. And it’s already made an impact on science education – the paper is now reading material for UT students in BIO 370: Evolution, a required course for all biology majors and premeds. In an article published in Nature, Peter Visscher, a quantitative geneticist at the University of Queensland in Australia, described Narasimhan’s paper as "a real tour de force and clever use of computational deep-learning methodology."

See past winners

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