Further Findings

Liza Shapiro

Scientists arrive at their careers in different ways. Some follow a childhood interest, others are inspired by a teacher or discover a passion in a class they took on a lark and others find they have a talent in a field they hadn’t considered.
Further Findings will highlight the paths that some researchers at The University of Texas at Austin took to the laboratory, the library, the field—wherever they do their work.

First up is Liza Shapiro, a professor of physical
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Mikhail Matz

The things Mikhail Matz, an assistant professor of integrative biology, and his colleagues were looking for off the island of Little San Salvador in the Bahamas, were creatures with “big eyes, nicely colored and that glow in the dark.”

The scientists were aboard Operation Deep Scope, a research expedition sponsored by the Ocean Exploration program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They explored the deep sea with a submersible vessel looking for things related to the interaction between light
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Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at The University of Texas at Austin, was quoted in the press more than 230 times during the 2008 presidential election.

Bruce Buchanan

He was one of several of the university’s experts whose research helped news consumers make sense of what was happening during the campaign. Others included Daron Shaw, Sean Theriault and James Galbraith.

“I’ve kind of defined it as a part of my portfolio as kind of a public service and for that reason I rarely
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Adela Ben-Yakar, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, is featured in an article in the December 2008 edition of Wired magazine and on the magazine’s Web site.

She is developing laser microscalpels that would be able to excise a cancerous cell without damaging neighboring cells.

We wrote about her work for a Campus Cameo in the Playbook program distributed at Longhorn football games. It was in the Oct. 25 edition (the Oklahoma State game). For those of you who
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New posters were recently installed in the display windows on the first floor of the Main Building on The University of Texas at Austin campus.

They focus on four University of Texas at Austin researchers who made significant discoveries and brought new understanding to long-standing questions in their fields.

They are Hermann J. Muller, Linda Schele, Esmond Snell and Americo Paredes.

The poster with this post is about Schele, who studied the Mayan civilization of Central America.

Take a walk though the Main Building to
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The Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) at The University of Texas at Austin holds its Ready to Commercialize conference on Nov. 18 at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Austin.

The conference gives prospective investors a taste of the research at the university of Texas at Austin that is poised to make the leap from the laboratory to the marketplace.

The researchers get about two minutes each to describe their inventions and how they might be used as products to the audience. Then, the
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The stars at night are big and bright deep … in West Texas, where McDonald Observatory sits in the Davis Mountains.

My wife and I topped off a trip to Big Bend National Park by attending a Star Party at the observatory on Nov. 8. We had a quick dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Fort Davis and drove the 17 winding miles to the observatory. We knew we were getting close when we saw two white telescope domes basking in the moonlight.

We
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I was walking down the hall of the administration building at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., when I saw an oil portrait of what appeared to be a familiar face. I looked more closely at the face and then at the identification and it was, indeed, Hans Mark, current professor of engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

Mark was the director of the NASA-Ames from 1969-1977 and chancellor of the University of Texas System from 1984-1992.
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Christian Rabeling was facing the deadline for finishing the fieldwork for his master’s thesis.

As part of his work, Rabeling mapped entrances to ant nests in a Brazilian rain forest. And to find an entrance, you follow an ant. The ants he was studying weren’t helping.

“A. they’re small and B. they’re slow,” he said.

Breathe on a leaf near an ant and it will freeze in its tracks. It takes a while for them to get going again. “It requires a
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Professor John Ivy, developer of Puresport.

John Ivy, a professor in the Department of Health Education and Kinesiology, has studied human performance for decades. He knows what helps athletes compete better and what doesn’t.

He’s poured that knowledge into a sports drink called PureSport. It combines carbohydrates, protein and other essentials to help athletes during an event and for recovery after.

“We did taste tests on about 10 different flavors over about four different runs to get the four flavors and consistency we
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