News

University opens manufacturing research center
McAllen Monitor - 10-Apr-2008
Officials at the University of Texas-Pan American and South Texas College hope to usher in a new economic age in the Rio Grande Valley. This morning U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez and local business and education leaders plan to open the first phase of the much-anticipated Rapid Response Manufacturing Center at UTPA. The center is the first part of a combined project between businesses and local educational institutions, including UTPA and STC, to transform the Valley's manufacturing industry into a global powerhouse. See complete article.


Researchers receive $7 million for obesity programs
Valley Morning Star - 9 - Apr - 2008
A group of Rio Grande Valley researchers has received a $7 million grant to create programs designed to curb the region's obesity and diabetes epidemic.
Researchers at The University of Texas School of Public Health's Brownsville regional campus were awarded a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, officials have announced. The school is using these funds to establish The Center of Excellence on Diabetes in Americans of Mexican Descent, which will be devoted to developing prevention programs for diabetes and obesity in Mexican Americans, according to officials. The center is part of the existing Hispanic Health Research Center. See complete article.

Xitronix Selected as Texas Emerging Technology Fund Recipient
Austin dBusiness News - 4 Apr 2008
The Austin Chamber of Commerce and the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization (CenTex RCIC) announce that the state of Texas has chosen Xitronix Corporation, a Central Texas semiconductor company, as a recipient of an award funded through the Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF). Austin-based Xitronix, a company specializing in providing breakthrough process control metrology equipment to semiconductor manufacturers, will receive a $500,000 project grant to match raised funds and accelerate the commercialization of its innovative technology development. See complete article.


UTB-TSC receives biomedical research grant
Brownsville Herald - 31-Mar-2008
The School of Health Sciences at UTB-TSC has received a four-year grant totaling $1.03 million to continue a program to motivate and train Hispanics to become biomedical research scientists. See complete article.


Nearly $500 million available for biotech companies
Austin Business Journal - 28-Mar-2008
In an increasingly rough economic environment, it's rare to find a room full of unbridled optimism -- but that's exactly how the atmosphere was at the Bio Greater Austin Council's Bio Bash event in early March, when the heavy hitters of Central Texas' life sciences industries gathered to make note of the region's growth in those industries. Nor is that optimism misplaced, says Isaac Barchas, director of the University of Texas' IC2 Institute: in the last several months nearly $500 million in venture capital funds targeting life sciences have closed or are in the works in Central Texas. See complete article

Satellite campus to help develop new businesses
Brownsville Herald - 25-Mar-2008
A satellite campus of the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texsa Southmost College will include office space available for rent to start-up businesses, officials said Monday. Officials said they will use a $300,000 federal grant to develop a business incubator project at the UTB-TSC satellite campus that is set to break ground here next month. See complete article.


Next generation of 'smart' drugs
Houston scientists find innovative ways to trick body's defenses, target tumors
Houston Chronicle - 16 - Mar - 08 Just 1 percent of the typical cancer drug that enters the body ends up in its intended target, a tumor. The rest is either whacked by the body's defenses or allowed to go on a rampage destroying healthy tissue. As most cancer patients will attest, this traditional system of treatment is inefficient — at best. But as scientists have deepened their understanding of the intricate workings inside the body's cells, they have begun developing "smart" drugs that ferry medicine directly to the doorstep of cancer cells. Now, hundreds of these promising new therapies are approaching clinical trials, and a few are in advanced testing and nearing use in patients. Beyond these breakthroughs, yet another generation of even smarter drugs is under development, researchers say. Among the latter is a drug developed in Houston that uses a two-stage approach to deliver its payload, much as NASA's Apollo launches used multiple stages rather than a single rocket to put men on the moon. See complete article.

In Texas, Small Is Big
Fiscal Notes 10 Mar 2008 Nanotech in Texas A scientific and technological revolution promises to produce the biggest changes in our daily lives since the rise of computer technology. The revolution is nanotechnology, which is expected to have a trillion-dollar impact on the world economy within a few years. And Texas is in the forefront of the research and development needed to fulfill its promise. Nanotech is not a single science or engineering discipline, but an approach that involves - and is changing - many fields of knowledge. According to Rice University, a world leader in the field, nanotech involves understanding, manipulating and building structures from individual atoms and molecules - structures in the range of one to 1,000 nanometers in size. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. See complete article

UTEP office helps enhance technology, secure border El Paso Times - 10 Mar 2008 Creating a virtual fence to protect the nation's Southwest border has been a challenging project -- politicians criticizing it as an ineffectual "shortcut" and civil liberties groups branding it as an invasion of privacy. Jose Riojas -- retired brigadier general and former Joint Task Force-North commander -- sees opportunities. "I've had conversations with (the lead contractor on the project) for many months," he said last week. The conversations "are very informal, sharing ideas among professionals." Riojas is now head of the University of Texas at El Paso's Office of Strategic Initiatives, which is positioning itself to become a leader in creating solutions to border and homeland security challenges. With grants of $1 million or more from the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department, the office already has received some recognition for its efforts. See complete article.

UT gets $17 million grant from nuclear weapons agencyAustin American-Statesman 08 March 2008 The University of Texas and four other universities will receive $17 million each during a five-year period to conduct research in the emerging field of predictive science for the federal agency that oversees nuclear weapons. UT and the other schools — the California Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Purdue University and Stanford University — won't be working with such weapons. Rather, they will develop computer models, software and analytical methods for addressing problems in physics and engineering similar to those encountered with nuclear arms. Researchers at UT, for example, will focus on the high temperatures, turbulence and other physical processes encountered when a spacecraft re-enters Earth's atmosphere. "Much of the physics is the same" as what a ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead would encounter during re-entry, said J. Tinsley Oden, director of UT's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. See complete article

New UTSA program to jump-start inventions
UTSAToday - 5 Mar 2008 As part of its mission to move UTSA technologies from the benchtop to the marketplace, the UTSA Office of the Vice President for Research and South Texas Technology Management (STTM) have announced the creation of a new internal funding program to advance UTSA discoveries toward commercialization. Roadrunner Proof of Concept, or POCRR, will provide short-term grants of up to $25,000 beginning this spring. "The first Roadrunner POC proposal deadline is April 15, 2008. STTM will select and award the funds shortly thereafter," said Robert W. Gracy, UTSA vice president for research. See complete article

Nanomedicine System Engineered To Enhance Therapeutic Effects Of Injectable Drugs
Science Daily - 3 Mar 2008 A proof-of-concept study on a new multistage delivery system (MDS) for imaging and therapeutic applications has been proposed in Nature Nanotechnology in an article authored by Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D., of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. This discovery could go a long way toward making injectable drugs more effective. "This is next generation nanomedicine," said Ferrari, the senior author. "Now, we're engineering sophisticated nanostructures to elude the body's natural defenses, locate tumors and other diseased cells, and release a payload of therapeutics, contrasting agents, or both over a controlled period. It's the difference between riding a bicycle and a motorcycle." Nanotechnology offers new and powerful tools to design and to engineer novel drug delivery systems and to predict how they will work once inside the body. See complete article.

State looks to invest in technology
Seguin Gazette-Enterprise - 28-Feb-2008
Calling all mad scientists, nutty professors and any clever inventors who want to take a high technology product to the marketplace.
David Clark of the San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative office would like to introduce you to the governor.
Clark, director of investment services for SATAI, said inventive entrepreneurs are what the state is seeking to participate in its Emerging Technology Fund, a program to help fund the commercialization of new technology. The fund was created through legislation designed to expedite innovation and commercialization of research that results in placing a high technology product in the marketplace.
Inventors of high tech products can access a pool of about $295 million that is maintained by the governor’s office to promote such activity. See Complete Article

Texas Emerging Technology Fund to Invest in El Paso Tech Company
Secretary of State Phil Wilson Website - 26 Feb 2008
EL PASO Today, Secretary of State Phil Wilson announced that the Texas Emerging Technology Fund (TETF) will invest $150,000 in TXL Group, Inc., of El Paso, Texas. Up to $1 million total investment may be available to the company if they meet certain performance benchmarks.  The decision marks the first pre-seed funding awarded by the TETF and will assist TXL in their development of new technology to harvest roadway heat and convert it into energy. “As a state known for triple-digit summer temperatures and home to the most state highway miles in the country, this is an exciting project for Texas,” stated Wilson.  “The TXL Group has shown innovative leadership in addressing the future energy needs of our state and is a good example of a company turning challenges into opportunities through creative technology.” See complete Press Release

UTB-TSC to offer research-based physics program
The Brownsville Herald - 25-Feb-2008
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.05 million grant to UTB-TSC and its Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy to fund 10 scholarships in physics that include high-level research in astronomy. “Essentially, we’re redefining what it means to be a student in physics and also developing a curriculum around this program,” said Fredrick A. Jenet, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College and director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy.
Jenet said the university is targeting the type of student who until recently has had to go out of the Rio Grande Valley to obtain the type of science education they were looking for. See complete article.

Texas a top contender in biotech field, report says
Houston Business Journal - 25-Feb-2008
Texas has been named for the first time as one of the top five biotechnology economic development regions in the world by newsletter FierceBiotech. In addition to Texas, the 2008 rankings include New York, Massachusetts, Florida and California, as having state programs that are "driving the development of new facilities that will likely have a profound impact in determining where the industry will find its most fertile soil for future growth."

The Washington, D.C.-based newsletter chose Texas because of its $3 billion investment in cancer research, led by The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. See complete article.

Bill Gates visits UT computer science studentsMicrosoft founder says there's a need to focus on software
AMERICAN-STATESMAN - 18-Feb-2008
When you are the founder of Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. may be a business irritant, but the lack of top-notch computer science students is also a pressing problem. Computer science enrollments are down in the top schools across the country since the start of the dot-com crunch seven years ago, which is part of the reason Bill Gates, the world's richest man, was speaking to a packed house Wednesday morning at the Texas Union Ballroom on the University of Texas campus. Gates, 52, exhorted computer science and electrical and computer engineering students to pursue careers in software development, which he says will push the ongoing digital revolution, enable scientific breakthroughs and even help the world's poor. See complete article.

Pickens gift propels brain health research
Dallas Business Journal - 15-Feb-2008
For a brief period on Feb. 12, billionaire and philanthropist T. Boone Pickens entered the world of Asperger syndrome. He did so through a computer program that created a simulation of himself in a virtual world, where others who suffer from Asperger syndrome -- a sort of autism -- learn to interact with others more effectively thanks to a structured simulated environment. "This program has helped me a lot on my job," said one of the patients, who was manning a computer-simulated person -- called an "avatar" See complete article.

Superpowerful 'Ranger' has scientists lining up
Sun Microsystems-UT venture runs on AMD hardware, slated to crunch numbers on nature
AMERICAN-STATESMAN - 18 - Feb - 2008
Waves of color ripple across the screen of Omar Ghattas' laptop. The University of Texas geoscientist is replaying a computer visualization showing waves of seismic energy rippling through the Los Angeles Basin after a simulated earthquake along the San Andreas Fault more than 100 miles away. It took four days to create that visualization a few years ago on a supercomputer in San Diego. Now, Ghattas has a more powerful machine to work with: a new supercomputer nicknamed Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT's J.J. Pickle Research Campus. Ghattas said Ranger is five times as powerful as anything scientists have worked with in the United States in the past. In many fields, better computing translates to better science. In Ghattas' case, the machine will deliver earthquake simulations with twice the level of resolution, or detail, than could be done previously. See complete article.

Beyond UT, A&M Legislators: Create another flagship university
Opinion Editorials 17 Feb 2008
There are two possible scenarios for the crowding crisis in Texas' top universities: Students can continue competing like mad to get into limited spots at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University. Or legislators can create a third, maybe even a fourth, flagship school that high schoolers want to attend.
This newspaper has been arguing for more flagship schools for several years, so it's good news that Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has turned the issue into a priority. Mr. Dewhurst, a Republican, asked Democratic Sen. Judith Zaffirini of Laredo to lead a Senate study into the issue before the 2009 session. She wants the committee to create a process legislators could use in determining which school or schools become the next flagships. The call undoubtedly will be difficult. When Gov. John Connally lobbied in the 1960s to turn A&M into a flagship school, Texas didn't have other schools to consider as a competitor to UT. Now, numerous schools could become the next leading research and teaching facility. For instance, the UT schools of North Texas. Texas Tech University. The University of Houston. The University of Texas at San Antonio. They are what experts term "emerging research universities." . See full article.

Chamber calls for creation of Austin medical schoolFull-fledged operation could be worth $2.4 billion a year, 19,000 jobs, study says.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN - 12-Feb-2008
Austin's main business group joined with the city's mayor, state senator and major hospital executives Monday to call for the establishment of a medical school here.

Officials of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce released an economic analysis they commissioned that concluded that a medical school would pump $2.4 billion a year into the region's economy and generate more than 19,000 jobs through direct employment, spinoff activity and startup firms. See full article.

UTMB plans $90 million research building
Galveston County Daily News - 10 - Feb - 2008
GALVESTON — Plans are under way to build a $90 million research building at The University of Texas Medical Branch, officials have announced. The research building will be located on Sixth Street and Harborside, across the street from the school’s Primary Care Pavilion. It will house offices and laboratories for medical branch researchers. The building, along with the $167 million, federally funded National Biocontainment Laboratory, should help the medical branch attract scientists from around the world to the island, said Garland D. Anderson, dean of the School of Medicine.
“It means we can continue to make progress with our research,” he said. See complete article.

Two scientists win major prizes
Austin American-Statesman - 08 - Feb - 2008
Two UT scientists — computer scientist E. Allen Emerson and chemist Allen Bard — have won prestigious prizes for their research. Emerson won the A.M. Turing Award, considered the most prestigious in computer science, along with collaborator Edmund Clarke of Carnegie Mellon University and Joseph Sifakis, who worked independently at the University of Grenoble in France. They were cited for innovations in a quality assurance process known as model checking. The Association for Computing Machinery will present the award, which carries a $250,000 prize underwritten by Google Inc. and Intel Corp., on June 21 in San Francisco…See complete article.

Perry pushes universities for more startups

Austin Business Journal - 08-Feb-2008
Gov. Rick Perry has outlined a plan for Texas universities to churn out startup companies faster and with less red tape.

While campuses statewide feel pressure, leaders at the University of Texas say they already have met his mandates.

In the fall, Perry and state officials met with university leaders to outline several goals he wanted to reach within a year, including:

• Standard intellectual property contracts across university systems.
• More collaboration between campuses.
• Having one person at each university as a contact for businesspeople and investors. See complete article.

State wants added path to tenure at Texas universities
Austin Business Journal - 08-Feb-2008
The way academic institutions grant tenure to faculty may change as part of Gov. Rick Perry's push to make commercialization a priority at Texas universities.

Perry is proposing that all public universities make the commercialization of research one of the several factors considered when granting tenure to professors, according to Secretary of State Phil Wilson. See complete article.

 

University of Texas at Dallas professor wins national honor
Nano researcher joins National Academy of Engineering
DallasNews - 07-Feb-2008
A nanotechnologist and University of Texas at Dallas chemistry professor has received a huge honor for working with minuscule technology.
Ray Baughman, the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Chemistry and director of the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute at UTD, will join another Texan and 63 other new members elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the organization will announce today. See complete article.

New research university considered

Third Texas flagship school could boost economy, increase research availability

The Daily Texan - 06 Feb 2008
UT and Texas A&M may have more academic competition if a proposed committee finds that the state needs a third research university.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst ordered a study on the need for such a flagship university last week when he announced his interim charges.
The study will determine the impact of another research university in the state. A committee will review the cost, need and location of the possible university and will also hold hearings and gather testimony from the public and experts in higher education across Texas. See complete article.

McDonald Observatory Receives $190,000 NASA Grant; Will Train Texas Elementary, Middle School Teachers in Science Education
UT Austin News - 07-Feb - 2008
AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory has been awarded a grant of about $190,000 from NASA to train teachers across the state in science education. The project will develop, test and implement professional development workshops for 500 Texas teachers of grades 3-8 that will be delivered via videoconference.

In Texas, students are tested on science in the fifth, eighth and 10th grades. This training program will specifically address questions that Texas students score low on in the fifth-grade standardized test (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills).

McDonald Observatory is partnering with the Texas Regional Collaboratives for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching in this project, and that group is contributing funding for the state-wide effort as well. See complete article.