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Research Prizes and Honors
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Seven Faculty Receive Moncrief Grand Challenge Awards
Seven researchers are confronting what the scientific community has defined as this century's grand challenges in drug design, environmental sustainability and improved oil recovery using Moncrief Grand Challenge Faculty awards for 2011-12.
The awards, funded by the private donations of oilman and philanthropist W. A. "Tex" Moncrief of Fort Worth and an anonymous donor, enable scientists and engineers to work at the Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences (ICES) on challenges that affect the competitiveness and international standing of the United States.
The Moncrief researchers for 2011-12 and their projects are:
 Todd Arbogast, right, professor in the Department of Mathematics, on methods for simulating long-term carbon sequestration.
 Chandra Bajaj, left, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, on three-dimensional imaging at the molecular level of therapeutic drug targets.
 Tom Hughes, right, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, on modeling the behavior of nanoparticles in blood vessels to design drug delivery systems.
 Dmitrii Makarov, left, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, on the design of molecular-level biosensors.
 Mark Mear, right, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, on modeling reservoir stimulation techniques to improve recovery of oil and natural gas.
 Tess Moon, left, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, on studying the ways mechanical loads are carried in proteins and their relationship to the progression of disease.
 Pengyu Ren, right, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, on simulating drug binding to proteins to determine drug effectiveness.
News and Information
National Science Foundations Releases New Strategic Plan
The National Science Foundation's new strategic plan outlines three goals that the agency's programs and activities: transform the frontiers, innovate for society, and perform as a model organization. Read more about the plan and read the entire plan itself.
Quoted-UT Researchers in the News
 (In an article about changes in the most popular names for babies, Javier Auyero, professor in the Department of Sociology, warns against assigning larger meaning to the name selections).
Experts caution against assuming assimilation as a given. “Jonathan is a very popular name among the low-income groups in Argentina,” said Prof. Javier Auyero, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin. “That doesn’t mean they are Americanized.”
Research Opportunities
Important University Research Deadlines
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
The University of Texas at Austin Stimulus Package Web page is online.
Funding Sources
Department of Education
Education Research and Development Center Program
Deadlines: Letter of Intent, July 21, 2011; Application, Sept. 22, 2011
Department of Energy
2012 INCITE Call for Proposals
Deadline: June 30, 2011
Terrestrial Ecosystem Science
Deadline: Sept. 12, 2011
National Institutes of Health
Virtual Reality Technologies for Research and Education in Obesity and Diabetes
Deadline: June 5, 2011
Exploratory/Developmental Grants Program for Basic Cancer Research in Cancer Health Disparities
Deadlines: June 23, 2011; Nov. 23, 2011
National Science Foundation
Long Term Research in Environmental Biology
Deadline: July 13, 2011
Instrument Development for Biological Research
Deadline: July 29, 2011
Solar, Heliospheric and Interplanetary Environment
Deadline: Aug. 17, 2011
Mechanics of Materials
Deadline: Oct. 1, 2011
Experimental Nuclear Physics
Deadline: Oct. 26, 2011
Social-Computational Systems
Deadline: Nov. 11, 2011
Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems
Deadline: Nov. 15, 2011
SBE Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants
Deadline: Vary for different programs
Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas
Texas Life Science Incubator Infrastructure Awards (PDF)
Deadline: Aug. 30, 2011
Arts, Humanities and Culture
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center Fellowships 2012-2013
Deadline: Oct. 15, 2011
Other Funding Opportunities
UNESCO
UNESCO-L'OREAL International Fellowships Programme for Young Women in Life Sciences (2012)
Deadline: June 30, 2011
American Heart Association
Funding opportunities for range of academic levels
Deadline: See individual opportunities
Mazda Foundation
Grants
Deadline: July 1, 2011
Japan-US Friendship Commission
Japanese Studies in the United States
Deadline: Aug. 1, 2011
Research Project
Moving Boundary Methods for Stochastic Control Problems
 RESEARCHER: Kumar Muthuraman, associate professor, Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management, principal investigator
AGENCY: National Science Foundation
AMOUNT:$200,000
The research objective of this award is to develop and extend an emerging class of techniques referred to as Moving Boundary Methods for solving hard free-boundary problems in stochastic control. Stochastic control refers to optimal decision making under uncertainty. Applications can be found in a variety of physical, economic, management and biological systems. Despite their wide applicability, problems in these classes are not analytically tractable except in very special cases and several remain unsolved even numerically. This award specifically identifies some problems in financial engineering, operations management and healthcare. Each of these problems, while being very significant by itself, also has distinct features that will make the methods developed, applicable to larger classes of problems.
If successful, the developed methods will solve a large class of decision-making problems previously considered intractable. The project brings together a set of very important and hard control problems under the unifying framework of free-boundary problems and seeks to develop a set of novel computational methods. Success in the project has two major implications. First, it significantly advances the research on stochastic control. Second, the results and insights gained in each of the four specific projects will have a direct impact in financial engineering, operations management and healthcare. Optimal decision-making in healthcare is in its infancy and is poised to have a huge impact in prolonging life expectancies and reducing costs. Success in this project will also give healthcare professionals the much-needed confidence to view more problems from a quantitative perspective.
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