Three scholars have been recognized with a University Research Excellence Award, one of the most prominent symbols of peer recognition at the University of Texas at Austin. The awards are presented annually and are selected through a competitive peer-review process.
"This year’s recipients demonstrate the extraordinary breadth and depth of research at UT Austin and reflect our mission to push the boundaries of knowledge and creativity," said Dan Jaffe, vice president for research. "Their contributions exemplify UT researchers' commitment to pursue groundbreaking ideas and enrich communities in Texas and across the world."
The 2024 recipients, who will be honored at a ceremony in the spring, 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.
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."
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."