2011-2012

	Professor Ra'anan Boustan Early Judaism, Jewish-Christian Relations University of California - Los Angeles UT Austin Host: Department of Religious Studies Professor Boustan is a historian of early Judaism trained in the study of ancient Mediterranean religions. His research focuses on Jewish literary and material culture in late antiquity (c. 200–800 CE), with special emphasis on how these sources shed light on the dynamic intersections between Judaism and other Mediterranean religious traditions—Greek, Roman, and Christian.
	Professor Ali Khademhosseini Microfabricated Materials for Tissue Regeneration Harvard-MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School UT Austin Host: Department of Biomedical Engineering Professor Khademhosseini uses a multi-disciplinary approach to develop microscale and nanoscale technologies with the ultimate goal of generating tissue engineered organs and controlling cell behavior.
	Professor Lamar Pierce Organizational Strategy and Ethics Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis UT Austin Host: Department of Business, Government, and Society Professor Pierce’s research focuses on the psychological and economic motivation for behavior that destroys economic value. He studies why we, as employees and citizens, act in ways we know to be destructive to the organizations and individuals around us, and what environmental, social, and financial factors bring us back into the fold of productive behavior.
	Professor Rachel Ward Mathematical Signal Processing Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University UT Austin Host: Department of Mathematics Professor Ward applies theoretical tools from probability, harmonic analysis, and optimization to problems arising in signal processing. In particular, modern signal acquisition techniques achieve higher rates of compression than traditionally thought possible by allowing for a small probability of reconstruction error.  She is interested in the algorithmic and information-theoretic limits of these techniques.