I originally wrote this blog aiming to publish it in mid-March of 2020. I was traveling back to Austin at the time and suggested that we hold off until we saw how COVID unfolded. It is a year later, and I’m still not sure if now is the right time to talk about climate change in Texas. We’ve lost 2…

Karen Johnson, an associate professor in the School of Nursing and Whole Communities–Whole Health researcher, remembers administering her first COVID-19 vaccine — and the rush of adrenaline that came over her.

Borders today are understood as political demarcations that separate states and nation-states. But, sometimes, we share more in common with the people beyond these arbitrary lines than we think. Especially in the early 20th century and before, the natural environment typically helped shape people’s…

In Texas, change is inevitable.

In the past, changes in sea level, droughts, erosion or sedimentation, or flooding have led to the abandonment of settlements. Those ruined towns and cities bear witness to environmental changes that left them unsustainable.

Issues surrounding the ethical uses of AI make front page news all the time. In 2020, Amazon paused police use of facial recognition software because of rising criticism from civil rights activists about its tendency to misidentify Black and Hispanic people. The use of video surveillance tools to…

You might not know it, but surveillance is happening all around us all the time. Businesses, governments, and nonstate actors are gathering information — whether it’s to sell us something on social media or screen us when we apply for a home loan. Researchers from both The University of Texas at…

Through all eras of human history, communities have confronted stresses related to climate change that have affected how and where they live. Studying past societies helps us recognize the long-term effects of these stresses — which can be hard to see in the moment—and understand how humans will…

Maria De-Arteaga was working remotely as an investigative journalist in Madrid when she realized that data mining and machine learning could help to uncover social problems in the developing world. She was looking into a highway that Brazil had built through the Amazon rainforest to reach a port on…

In the future, Texas is expected to face increasing exposure to a wide range of climate-driven natural disasters — most notably deadly catastrophic flooding from hurricanes, storm surges, and extreme rain events.