Caroline Schomer joined UT Austin in 2022 and plays a pivotal role in the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and Institutional Biosafety Committee ensuring researchers follow regulations in a sensitive and complex research arena.

The creator of a code to predict hurricane storm surges and an expert on the federal courts and constitutional law have been named the 2024 recipients of The University of Texas at Austin President’s Research Impact Award.

The 3D installation will feature models and maps from the Texas coastline to the eclipse path of totality and will showcase modeling research aimed at understanding how climate change and extreme weather events influence the distribution of organisms that may cause emerging diseases.

The study found that increased physical activity lengthened the time it takes to enter the REM stage. The researchers believe that this is because exercise helps to consolidate deeper sleep stages before REM.

Multiple brain-computer interface (BCI) devices can allow now users to do everything from control computer cursors, to translate neural activity into words, to convert handwriting into text. While one of the latest BCI examples appears to accomplish very similar tasks, it does so without the need for time-consuming, personalized calibration or high-stakes neurosurgery.

Imagine playing a racing game like Mario Kart, using only your brain to execute the complex series of turns in a lap. This is not a video game fantasy, but a real program that engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have created as part of research into brain-computer interfaces to help improve the lives of people with motor disabilities.

The total solar eclipse on April 8 will be a once in a lifetime opportunity to witness a truly awesome cosmological marvel. You don’t need a scientific background to appreciate its stunning visual beauty, but astronomers and astrophysicists at The University of Texas at Austin have used these rare phenomena to help answer fundamental questions about our universe.

When people learn things they should not know, getting them to forget that information can be tough. This is also true of rapidly growing artificial intelligence programs that are trained to think as we do, and it has become a problem as they run into challenges based on the use of copyright-protected material and privacy issues.

Researchers working in the Horn of Africa have uncovered evidence showing how Middle Stone Age humans survived in the wake of the eruption of Toba, one of the largest supervolcanoes in history, some 74,000 years ago. The behavioral flexibility of these Middle Stone Age people not only helped them live through the supereruption but may have facilitated the later dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and across the rest of the world.

Sara Hernando is Assistant Director for Research Engagements in OVPR and works as part of the Research Development team, managing strategic partnerships with key collaborators engaging in research on the Forty Acres. Read more in our latest OVPR staff profile series.