Further Findings

Mary Wheeler, member American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Mary Wheeler does complex mathematics and computation to figure out what’s going on under the surface. She’s director of the Center for Subsurface Modeling at The University of Texas at Austin and her work is used to recover and gas, determine where groundwater contaminants are going and whether carbon sequestration works.

She was named this week as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Read about Wheeler in a Cockrell School of Engineering
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Loren Kaake

Translating a scientific concept into an easy-to-understand image can be hard, but here’s how a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin did it with BBs and a cake pan.

See the video of charge transport in a cake pan

At the Electronic Frontiers Research Center (EFRC) on Charged Transport and Polymers, Loren Kaake, a post-doctoral fellow, researches how to make organic semiconductors for solar panels.

The organic materials in question are polymers, or plastics. Photovoltaic cells made from plastic would go
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John Goodenough and Steven Chu at the Enrico Fermi award ceremony on Jan. 12, 2010.

It was the first day of the spring 2010 semester and two students were in John Goodenough’s office conferring about experiments and research papers. On Goodenough’s desk were papers he was to referee. Later, there were classes to teach.

Of course, it was a career of such tasks and a lot of work in the lab that made Goodenough the toast of the town in Washington, D.C.,
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Mark Nimlos, National Renewable Energy Laboratory

To get to some oil reserves, you have to drill deeply.

Scientists working on biofuels also drill deeply, but they drill into the molecular-level activity of enzymes instead of rock.

How energy researchers are doing this using the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is the subject of a story by Aaron Dubrow, TACC’s science writer.

Dubrow shares some of his thoughts about the research:

“I thought some of the most interesting parts of the story were that
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