UT Institutions Make Impact in Fight Against COVID-19

A group of nursing students at UT Arlington found an impactful way to give back to a rural community in need during the pandemic by volunteering to administer the COVID-19 vaccine. These second-semester senior nursing students in the College of Nursing and Health Innovation drove over two hours to help a clinic in Fannin County give more than 1,300 doses of the vaccine earlier this semester.

A new walk-in COVID-19 vaccination site opened at UT Arlington. Run by Tarrant County and The University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth, the new site aims to expand vaccine access to the southeast portion of the county and UTA’s 40,000 students.

UT Arlington has received $750,000 to help students negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s (THECB) second round of Texas Reskilling Grants. With the grants, UT Arlington will provide financial assistance to cover tuition and fees to help students in need get back on track for graduation.

UT Arlington will continue to incorporate “test score optional” admission and scholarship provisions for students applying to the University through summer 2023. This is an extension of a change first announced last year to ease the burden on incoming students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A new grant will help UT Arlington triple its fleet of telepresence robots and bring onboard new devices to continue clinical training for rural and remote nursing students during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Funded through the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Nursing Innovation Grant Program, telepresence robots, which resemble computer tablets on wheels, enable UTA nursing faculty members and students to move about a clinical space in another location and interact with patients and other caregivers.

Across Texas and beyond, thousands of Mavericks have stepped up during the COVID-19 response to show how they are improving communities in times of great need. A few of their stories were highlighted in the UT Arlington magazine.

Musicians from UT Arlington have teamed up with the Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts for a free weekly video series focused on different genres of music. The collaboration offers a way for students and faculty to continue performing and serving the community in the absence of live concerts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Cinematic Arts’ End of Semester Showcase at UT Arlington—a drive-in movie night that featured short films produced by undergraduate and graduate students—creatively and safely showcased students’ efforts, as they worked hard in the middle of the pandemic to complete their projects. Sierra Clark, a graduate student pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in cinematic arts, noted that  “Filmmaking is a collaborative medium that can take an insane number of hours to accomplish, so seeing your film or a film you helped create on the big screen is a rewarding experience.”

A recently published analysis from Evan Mistur, a UT Arlington assistant professor in the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs, suggests that nationalistic governments around the globe are more likely to copy other nationalistic governments in responding to the current pandemic.

Five student artists and two art professors from UT Arlington have created a colorful mural in the Science & Engineering Innovation & Research building that captures our unusual moment in history. The mural depicts colorful, 10-foot-tall head-and-shoulder portraits of individuals wearing masks. It occupies a basement hallway used by masked and gowned staffers of UTA’s North Texas Genome Center, which processes campus COVID-19 tests.

Erin Carlson, associate clinical professor and director of graduate public health programs in the College of Nursing and Health Innovation at UT Arlington, warns that during this upcoming holiday season, small gatherings could lead to big problems, so families should rethink their holiday plans. Carlson offers several holiday safety recommendations for assessing risks, traveling and gathering socially.

In a Halloween twist, the School of Social Work at UT Arlington will use a “trunk-or-treat” event to distribute more than 700 boxes of fresh vegetables, fruit, dairy items, meat and washable face masks to local families in need. Additionally, social work students, staff, faculty and alumni will hand out up to 500 packages with five washable masks in each.

Erin Carlson, director of graduate public health programs at UT Arlington, offers advice to stay safe from COVID-19 while exercising your civic duty.

Mohsen Shahandashti, assistant professor of civil engineering at UT Arlington, is determining how to keep transportation construction workers safe during the coronavirus pandemic while ensuring that critical infrastructure systems are properly inspected and maintained. Shahandashti is using a National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant to identify challenges that impact workforce decision-making processes in the transportation construction industry during the pandemic.

Amid a global pandemic, UT Arlington has organized virtual events—including bachata and salsa lessons, interactive trivia and speaker sessions—to mark Hispanic and Latinx Heritage Month.

UT Arlington’s Department of Theatre Arts and Dance is now streaming productions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, staging plays as well as dance and vocal performances that people can watch remotely. In the midst of all the unprecedented changes, the silver lining is that this opens up the students’ work to people who would never be able to come to the UTA theater.

Erin Carlson, an associate clinical professor in the College of Nursing and Health Innovation at UT Arlington, offers several Halloween safety recommendations to keep families healthy this holiday.

Dr. Katy Rezvani of UT Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center coauthored a report that describes a way to take donor T cells that target the novel coronavirus and make them resistant to the deadly effects of steroids.

Knowing that COVID-19 has severely affected low-income Latino communities, UT Arlington’s Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) gave 1,600 bags filled with masks, hand sanitizer and health information in English and Spanish to low-income families in Arlington to help stay safe.

Many students are enrolled in virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic and parents are concerned about how to make remote learning work. UT Arlington professor Peggy Semingson studies online learning and shares a few tips to help parents and families as they navigate the school year online.

A UT Arlington student group that wanted to support front-line workers during the COVID-19 pandemic has donated 600 face masks to Dallas Fire-Rescue. The group hopes to make more donations in the future and inspire other student groups to get involved.

Todd Castoe, associate professor of biology at UT Arlington, has co-authored two papers regarding the COVID-19 virus and its origins. The first study disputes earlier claims that the coronavirus may have jumped from dogs to humans. The second reconstructs the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the global COVID-19 crisis. Castoe also found no evidence that the virus was either manufactured in or accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan, China, as some have speculated.

A published study from researchers at UT Arlington suggests that using chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 (SARS-Cov-2) patients can have dangerous side effects, especially for older adults. The benefits of the drugs, say the authors, are “at best, hypothetical.”

UT Arlington is leveraging the expertise and resources of its North Texas Genome Center (NTGC) to bolster its on-campus COVID-19 testing capabilities. NTGC is establishing on-site COVID-19 test processing to help provide for the safe repopulation of the UTA campus and to assist local public health agencies.

A study co-authored by a team of mathematicians and scientists, including UT Arlington associate professor of political science Daniel Sledge, found that if physical distancing measures in the U.S. are relaxed while there is still no COVID-19 vaccine or treatment and while personal protective equipment remains in short supply, the number of resulting infections could be about the same as if distancing had never been implemented to begin with.

TMAC at UT Arlington received $3.3 million in federal funding to help small- and medium-sized businesses respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. TMAC is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership in Texas and works to bolster the global competitiveness of the state's economy by increasing its extended manufacturing enterprise through developing and improving profits, products, processes, technology and people.

Erin Carlson is a foodie who also oversees the UT Arlington School of Public Health. She offers precautions to take for those who want to dine out.

As UT Arlington prepares for a blended approach to fall 2020 courses, student accessibility to technology for online and hybrid courses is a top priority. Among its new resources and accommodations, the university is offering students laptop lending, better Wi-Fi, and specially designed socially distant computer labs.

For international students experiencing travel difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic, UT Arlington is making a number of academic programs available online to provide a first-class education to the Maverick family. New and continuing students who have submitted their financial and immigration documents are eligible to take fall 2020 classes online from their home countries and transition to on-campus enrollment in Arlington for the spring 2021 term.

After the coronavirus interrupted the spring semester, there was concern about how to screen the films created by students in UT Arlington’s Art & Art History Film/ Video Program. The response was UT Arlington’s first ever drive-in movie night showcasing short films produced by talented undergraduate and graduate students. Cars parked six feet apart and guests stayed in their vehicles during the event to observe campus social distancing while viewing 16 films encompassing a variety of genres.

A researcher at UT Arlington is developing a $5 portable device that can deliver COVID-19 testing results on-site in about 10 minutes. Seong Jin Koh, professor of material science and engineering, received a National Science Foundation RAPID grant to develop the device, which will be about the size of a person’s thumb.

A group of public health students and recent graduates from UT Arlington will volunteer this summer to aid Tarrant County Public Health (TCPH) with COVID-19 case investigations, contact tracing and data entry. The UTA students, who already are equipped with scientific and population-health knowledge in the five core areas of public health, will receive training in data collection and contact tracing investigation methods already in place at TCPH.

UT Arlington partnered with UTHealth to help health care providers make decisions that better protect themselves and their patients. A UTA team created a tool that outlines current COVID-19 testing strategies and the pros and cons associated with each to help clinicians identify and choose the best strategy for their practice and service.

UT Arlington trains and educates thousands of students each year for careers in nursing, public health and social work. This look at Mavericks on the front lines of the pandemic highlights a nurse, an epidemiologist and a social worker offering critical care and support to patients and the public during these difficult times.

Dr. Mamta Jain, professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, who oversees COVID-19 clinical trials, and Erin Carlson, associate clinical professor and director of graduate public health programs at UT Arlington’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation, discussed coronavirus and what North Texans need to know as the state reopens.

UT Arlington held a special drive-thru event for its newest freshmen, where school leaders safely distributed giveaways in cars and hoped to raise spirits with a DJ, balloons and cheering student leaders. University officials say they know it’s been a tough year for graduating high school seniors and they wanted to get them excited for their freshman year of college.

UT Arlington ranked among the best schools in Texas for education during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Educate to Career, a California-based education nonprofit. The ranking has traditionally focused on economic value, but this year also factored in the ability of colleges and universities to educate students remotely during the coronavirus pandemic.

Across the country, college students are staying off campuses and completing their studies online because of the coronavirus pandemic. But that hasn’t stopped dedicated students at UT Arlington from keeping their communities up-to-date and entertained with student-run media, including UTA Radio, UTA News en Español and The Shorthorn.

This week’s Mavericks on the Front Lines series profile two Mavericks who are using their skills and training to help others. Dr. Jocelyn Zee a critical care physician, and Elisabeth Berglund, a nursing senior, are demonstrating bravery and professionalism as they help patients during the pandemic. 

Working with artificial intelligence, a UT Arlington researcher is developing a rapid-response supply chain designed to quickly deliver COVID-19 medications, once they are available, to vulnerable urban populations in Texas.

An emergency medicine physician, a gatekeeper for COVID-19 testing and a social work student caring for the homeless are among the thousands of Maverick heroes providing essential support and care during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating that the UT Arlington community is a force for good. 

Among the 230,000 UT Arlington alumni and 60,000-plus students, staff and faculty are thousands of Maverick heroes providing essential support and care to their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. From treating ill patients to making do-it-yourself personal protective equipment to serving the hungry at food banks, Mavericks near and far are making a difference.

UT Arlington students are using 3D printers in the UTA Libraries FabLab facilities to make face shields for John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth. 

Erin Carlson, public health expert and associate clinical professor and director of graduate public health programs in the College of Nursing and Health Innovation at UT Arlington, provides guidelines for correct mask usage and useful prevention tips.

The 365 nursing students expected to earn their diplomas next month from UT Arlington’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation could soon find themselves on the front lines of a pandemic. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently expanded the state’s nursing workforce by allowing temporary permit extensions for recently graduated nurses who have yet to take the state’s licensing exam. The governor is also allowing students in their final year of nursing school to meet their clinical objectives by exceeding the 50% limit on simulated experiences.

Mavericks near and far provide essential services. From a UT Arlington freshman to veteran, front-line nurses, Mavericks are making a difference. 

When UT Austin researchers like Jason McLellan realized their work could make a difference in real-world health situations, they felt obligated to translate their findings into something that might help people and teamed up with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to develop an affordable, stable vaccine in an egg. In a major boost to efforts to combat COVID-19 globally, a vaccine that recently entered human trials in Vietnam and Thailand and is slated for a clinical study in Brazil, holds promise for affordable vaccine manufacturing in countries currently dependent on imported vaccines. The vaccine, called NDV-HXP-S, is the result of a partnership between UT Austin, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and global partners interested in advancing the supply of affordable vaccines to address the pandemic. Research by Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at UT Austin, and his team is aiding the development of these HexaPro-based vaccines, based on a more rugged and stable protein that is better able to withstand heat and better equipped for distribution to lower-income countries. To that end, the university set up a licensing arrangement that allows companies and labs in 80 low- and middle-income countries to use the protein in their vaccines without paying royalties. 

A new study co-authored by UT Austin undergraduate Tanvi Ingle and Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, provides public health planning authorities with a method of calculating the number of COVID-19 isolation beds they would need for people experiencing homelessness based on level of infection in the city. The research holds promise for controlling spread of the virus – or future infectious diseases – in a population that is highly vulnerable and less likely than many others to access health care services. 

Drug discovery researchers at UT El Paso and the University of New Mexico have leveraged their expertise to develop a rapid online tool to accelerate the discovery of drug therapies for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The machine learning models developed in the study were built on Frontera and Stampede2 supercomputing clusters operated by UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center. 

Jason S. McLellan, associate professor of molecular biosciences at UT Austin, is part of a corps of researchers hoping to take the technology they used on COVID-19 vaccines and apply them to an even more futuristic creation: an arsenal of off-the-shelf premade vaccines that could be easily modified to attack new pathogens as they arise. 

The most complete picture yet is coming into focus of how antibodies produced in people who effectively fight off SARS-CoV-2 work to neutralize the part of the virus responsible for causing infection. In the journal Science, researchers at UT Austin describe the finding, which represents good news for designing the next generation of vaccines to protect against variants of the virus or future emerging coronaviruses.

Dr. Clay Johnston, dean of UT Austin’s Dell Medical School, served as a moderator for a virtual town hall that focused on what life will be like once the COVID-19 pandemic ends. The event included remarks from epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. 

Kevin Thomas, professor of African and African diaspora studies at UT Austin and a newly named Carnegie fellow, hopes his ongoing research on U.S. and West African survivors of the Ebola epidemic will offer both insight and warning into what a future after COVID-19 might hold.

Remdesivir is currently the only antiviral drug approved in the U.S. for treating COVID-19 patients. A paper published by researchers from UT Austin, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, showed that four drugs used to treat hepatitis C render remdesivir 10 times better at inhibiting the coronavirus in cell cultures. These results indicate that a mixture containing remdesivir and a repurposed hepatitis C virus drug could potentially function as a combination antiviral therapy for COVID-19.

Researchers, doctors, frontline health care workers, students, volunteers, pharmacists, social workers and information technology professionals at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School and its clinical practice UT Health Austin collaborated to successfully plan, coordinate and execute the recent mass COVID-19 vaccination effort.

Although East Austin has historically suffered the most infections from COVID-19, it's West Austin that has so far received the most vaccines, according to a report from the COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at UT Austin. The differences mirror disparities in social vulnerability, as measured by the CDC's social vulnerability index.

Aaron Miri, chief information officer at Dell Med and UT Health Austin, and his team have proven that IT plays an essential role in managing the pandemic — one that reaches beyond telemedicine to address vaccine management, data security and more. Miri presents five key learnings for navigating the next phase of COVID-19. 

With vaccinations underway, companies are starting to announce their plans for post-COVID work arrangements. Greg Hallman, Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Finance and Real Estate and director of the Texas Real Estate Center and McCombs Real Estate Investment Fund, discusses the potential impact on businesses, workers, and the commercial real estate market.

UT Austin’s Texas Career Engagement shares tips and tools to help students gain experience amid hopes of a return to post-pandemic normalcy.

A highly contagious SARS-CoV-2 variant was unknowingly spreading for months in the United States by October 2020, according to a new study from researchers with the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. Scientists first discovered it in early December in the United Kingdom, where the highly contagious and more lethal variant is thought to have originated. An early-release version of the study provides evidence that the coronavirus variant B117 (501Y) had spread across the globe undetected for months when scientists discovered it.

UT Austin is among the top universities in the nation for pandemic research and has played a crucial role in protecting against the virus. Along with researchers at the National Institutes of Health, UT’s Jason McLellan and his team have made key discoveries, which major drug companies have used to develop vaccines. Coronavirus research has made progress thanks to UT Austin’s access to technology and equipment funded by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. The Sauer Laboratory for Structural Biology’s ultra-low-temperature electron microscopes and the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Frontera supercomputer continue to help researchers gain a better understanding of the disease and treatment. The Texas Department of State Health Services has designated UT as a vaccine hub for Texas. The university will be allocated supplies of vaccine from the state and is administering it to individuals in accordance with federal and state guidance to keep the university community — and greater Austin — safe from COVID-19. 

There is a troubling lack of transparency about data regarding the spread, toll and management of COVID-19 in state prisons, local jails and state-run juvenile facilities, according to a new report from researchers at UT Austin. LBJ School professor Michele Deitch, lead author of the report and a criminal justice policy expert, recommends ways in which prisons, jails, juvenile agencies, and state and local leaders should improve the data reporting. 

UT Austin researcher Jason McLellan will join dozens of virologists, immunologists and scientists answering people’s questions and concerns in a panel through the American Society for Virology.

At the start of the pandemic, a team of professors, researchers and experts from UT Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering and Dell Medical School invented the Automatic Bag Breathing Unit (ABBU) as a solution to the ventilator shortage. ABBU is a “bridge device” that offers an inexpensive alternative to higher-cost and less available ventilators. With seed funding from Dell Medical School’s Texas Health Catalyst program, Ruben Rathnasingham, Dell Med’s assistant dean for health product innovation, led the efforts to help translate the idea to the clinic through accelerated regulatory approval, external funding and manufacturing partnerships. Once approved by the FDA, ABBU will be available at an affordable cost to rural communities around the globe. The UT group is part of the national Bridge Ventilator Consortium that brings academic experts together to produce alternative ventilators amid a nationwide shortage.

Social isolation arising from COVID-19 has sparked significant mental health issues, resulting in a jump from 1 in 10 adults reporting anxiety or depressive disorder symptoms before the pandemic to 1 in 3 adults more recently. But new research by UT Austin’s Dell Medical School published in JAMA Psychiatry shows that loneliness, depression, anxiety and overall mental health among older people can be improved through an empathy-focused telephone program, known as “sunshine calls.” (2/23/21)  

A new report produced by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at UT Austin provides insight on students who took courses at a community college last fall. Juggling work and family obligations with classwork has been made even more difficult for these students during the pandemic, according to the report.

Researchers working on nearly 100 projects related to COVID-19 around the globe have had free access to some of the world’s most powerful computers in the past year, courtesy of a consortium led in part by the U.S. government and technology companies. Among the nearly 100 approved projects was one in which researchers at Utah State University worked with UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center to model the way virus particles disperse in a room.

After years of analyzing the human response to large-scale events, UT Austin professor James Pennebaker was thinking about the possible psychological effects of a global pandemic in today’s world. In March 2020, Pennebaker and psychology graduate student Ashwini Ashokkumar created and released a questionnaire that was translated into roughly 10 other languages to collect international data and drew over 20,000 respondents. Together, the questionnaire responses and text analysis discoveries make up what Pennebaker calls the Pandemic Project, an initiative that aims to discover the ways in which COVID-19 has changed the social fabric of our country.

Mary Jo Kirisits, an associate professor in UT Austin’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, is leading a team monitoring COVID-19 in Austin’s wastewater to identify upticks in cases before people show up with symptoms at clinics.

For an entire year now, the pandemic has upended life. Using publicly available data, researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin have quantified the many ways day-to-day activity has changed since the pandemic began. The researchers pulled data from 11 sources to create a new online dashboard that documents major changes in Austin. The dataset includes traffic patterns at major intersections throughout the city, COVID-19 case counts by ZIP code, water usage, real estate activity, retail spending, job postings, calls for city services and more. 

All viruses mutate as they make copies of themselves to spread and thrive. SARS-CoV-2, the virus the causes COVID-19, is proving to be no different. The UK, South Africa, and Brazil variants are more contagious and escape immunity easier than the original virus. Victor Padilla-Sanchez, a research scientist at The Catholic University of America, is running molecular dynamics simulations using the Frontera supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin to find out why the new variants are more transmissible.

A new variant of COVID-19 – B.1.429, a variant originating in California – has been found on the UT Austin campus. Dr. Andreas Matouschek, a biochemist, professor and director of the university’s Center for Biomedical Research Support, says there isn't enough evidence yet to confirm whether the newly-found variant is more infectious and explains how the new strains are more effective at infecting human cells. 

Dr. Shelley Payne, director of UT Austin’s LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease and professor of molecular biosciences, said we are still not close to herd immunity for COVID-19, saying about 70 to 80% of people must be vaccinated or have had the virus to reach it. Payne explains how vaccinating workers like school employees, who are in constant contact with many people, is vital to slowing the spread. Ensuring equitable access to the vaccine and important information to diverse communities is also critical to move toward herd immunity.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, small businesses have struggled to stay afloat. Because of this, two UT Austin students (Rashu Jain, a business honors, finance and math junior, and Niti Malwade, a business honors and computer science junior), came up with a way to help and to give back to local business owners — through storytelling. Inspired by the popular photoblog Humans of New York, where residents share their personal stories, Jain and Malwade started Stories of Austin — a storytelling platform on Instagram and Facebook that highlights the stories of small-business owners. Their goal was to focus on the passion and resilience displayed by local owners rather than on products and services.

A new multiscale coarse-grained model of the complete SARS-CoV-2 virion, its core genetic material and virion shell, has been developed for the first time using the Frontera supercomputer, operated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin. The model offers scientists the potential for new ways to exploit the virus's vulnerabilities.

UT Austin is suspending the SAT and ACT test score requirement for fall 2022 applicants, citing continued limited access to testing opportunities for students due the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Maria Croyle, a researcher at UT Austin’s College of Pharmacy, and her team have come up with an innovative way of configuring a vaccine: turning it into a peelable film that could be preserved without refrigeration for longer than conventional vaccines and taken by mouth rather than injected.

Scientists at UT Austin have recently discovered the mechanics behind how the antiviral drug remdesivir inhibits the virus replication in the body, which could lead to more effective treatments in the future. 

Richard Taylor, clinical assistant professor in the School of Human Ecology at UT Austin, co-authored a study which estimated that 1.7 million vaccine doses are needed to reach herd immunity for COVID-19 in Travis County. A new model could help public health officials in Central Texas better manage a much larger vaccination campaign.

Epidemiologists at UT Austin and other institutions have a new analysis that shows the value of having all people in the U.S. tested on a regular, rotating basis to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus and the loss of life from COVID-19. The team’s model is outlined in a paper published in The Lancet Public Health. 

UT Austin forecasters who make predictions about COVID-19 are shining some light on when life will return to normal. “It’s not so much whether we hit herd immunity, it’s whether we start seeing transmission levels that are acceptable to us as a population to start returning back to our normal lifestyles — particularly seeing mortality fall,” said Dr. Stephen Fox, a researcher at the UT Austin Modeling Consortium.

The Impact Factory is a unique program has helped UT Austin students launch a number of new ventures that have had a profound impact during the pandemic. Led by Dr. Michael Hole, a faculty member at both Dell Medical School and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, as well as a pediatrician and entrepreneur, the cross-sector collaboration is intended to foster civic innovation, entrepreneurship and service learning beyond the classroom.

A new study by researchers at UT Austin sheds new light on the COVID-19 antiviral drug remdesivir, the only treatment of its kind currently approved in the U.S. for the coronavirus. According to co-author Kenneth Johnson, professor of molecular biosciences, the finding could lead to more potent drugs, meaning a patient could take a smaller dose, see fewer side effects and experience faster relief.

Dr. Esther Melamed, an assistant professor of neurology at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School, and her colleagues are researching the condition known as “long COVID,” where symptoms persist even six months after infection.

Jason McLellan, a former NIH scientist now at UT Austin, was part of a team recruited to tailor a vaccine to the new coronavirus. The scientists had experimented on coronavirus vaccines in mice for years in collaboration with Moderna. McLellan’s research on the structures of proteins on coronaviruses has now been used by nearly all vaccine makers for COVID-19.

Dr. Alison Cahill, MD, MSCI, director of the UT Austin Dell Medical School Health Translation Research Institute and a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at UT Health Austin, says doctors have learned more about how the new coronavirus affects pregnant women and provides updates about potential risks and vaccinations. 

From research to mental health care to “herd accountability,” five leaders from Dell Medical School at UT Austin share their thoughts on how their work changed in 2020 and what opportunities and challenges lie ahead.

Dr. Ana Avalos, assistant professor of pediatrics at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School, provides an overview of the facts and debunks misconceptions surrounding currently approved COVID-19 vaccines

UT Health Austin, the clinical practice of Dell Medical School at UT Austin, was among the first in Texas to receive the long-awaited first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines. The 2,925 Pfizer vaccine vials received in December were the first of two doses earmarked to protect UT Austin’s front-line health care workers, including faculty, staff and students who are actively involved in clinical care delivery to patients in the Austin community. Facing the COVID-19 crisis, UT nurses were cheered by the arrival of the vaccine and as of January 2021, have administered almost 10,000 doses, and School of Nursing faculty, staff and students have volunteered more than 3,500 hours at UT Austin clinics.

Psychologist Ginny Maril, associate director for clinical services at UT Austin’s Counseling and Mental Health Center, says support is important in these times of social distancing, and gives tips on how people can cope going forward.

The Dell Medical School at UT Austin and Meals on Wheels of Central Texas have been testing a program that could help combat the health effects of loneliness and isolation, particularly among older people. Through “sunshine calls,” volunteers call older adults who are homebound and often isolated in their daily lives just to get them to talk about themselves. 

Fear in response to COVID-19 causes people to think more rigidly and makes it harder for them to recognize misinformation and more likely to spread it, according to a new research study led by Carola Salvi, Ph.D., a research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Dell Medical School at UT Austin. 

Sheri L. Burson from UT Austin’s Department of Kinesiology and Health Education worked with Professor Darla Castelli’s Kinetic Kidz Lab to understand how quarantine may affect child behavior. They distributed online questionnaires to parents in Central Texas, asking about types of physical activity, time spent sitting, and school and non-school device use. Presenting their results, the researchers also provide recommendations to keep kids moving during these challenging times.

As the first coronavirus wave hit the country, clinical faculty and residents working at Dell Seton Medical Center, the main teaching hospital of Dell Medical School at UT Austin, braced for impact. But months later, when leaders began to analyze COVID-19 case data from the beginning of the outbreak, the extraordinary came to light: Dell Seton’s patients survived at twice the rate of other COVID-19 patients across the nation. UT Dell Medical School physicians explain how these outcomes reflect their nimble internal working groups and community partners.

Dr. Amy Young, vice dean of professional practice at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School and chief clinical officer at UT Health Austin, explained how the hospital handled its first shipment of 2,925 doses of vaccine. Hospital staff started immunizing people the next day.

The Voces Oral History Center in the Moody College of Communication at UT Austin has been documenting the voices and stories of the Latino community since 1999, beginning with stories of World War II veterans. For the first time, they are documenting history as it is unfolding, creating the new collection “Voces of a Pandemic,” comprised of oral history interviews of the Latino experience with COVID-19.

The pandemic has caused sudden transition to online learning, remote work, new obligations to care for young children at home, and isolation from friends and relatives, life seems more unfamiliar, causing upticks in stress and anxiety. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, a professor at UT Austin and an expert on change, offers tips to help regain a sense of stability.

Twenty-nine LBJ School authors have come together to craft interdisciplinary and resilience-based policy solutions, published today in one toolkit called Resiliency in the Age of COVID-19. This toolkit comes as researchers from across UT Austin continue to offer first-of-its-kind groundbreaking research and discovery in the fight against COVID and its long-lasting impacts on public health, business and the future of governance.

Niharika Reddy Badi, a cancer research associate at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School, is currently working with a mouse colony for COVID-19 vaccine research with UT biologist and cancer researcher John Powers. Until last spring, Powers’s lab was focused on looking for potential cures for melanoma and pancreatic cancer.

The Frontera supercomputer at UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center — the fastest at any university in the world — allowed Ken Dill, director of the Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology at Stony Brook University, and his team to make structure predictions for 19 additional proteins for COVID-19. Each of these could serve as an avenue for new drug developments. They have made their structure predictions publicly available and are working with teams to experimentally test their accuracy.

Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, explains how they make projections for Austin.

The world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society has announced that Jason McLellan, a UT Austin associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, and Daniel Wrapp, a graduate student fellow, were among seven winners of this year’s Golden Goose Award. The prize this year went to scientists “whose federally funded research has had a significant impact for the response and treatment of COVID-19.” Their research has played a pivotal role in developing the monoclonal antibody therapies that, so far, appear to be one of the most effective ways to prevent severe cases of COVID-19.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., one of the most immediate needs that arose was filling a shortage of PPE for health care workers. So, inside UT Austin Cockrell School’s Texas Inventionworks studio, engineers immediately galvanized into action to create customized 3D-printed masks.

Highly effective COVID-19 vaccines have been developed in record time thanks to the scientific community’s rapid response to the COVID-19 outbreak and years of dedicated research. Remarkably, one key innovation, made by a small team of scientists at UT Austin and the National Institutes of Health, is powering many of the leading vaccines.

A Dell Med Department of Pediatrics research team led by Megan Gray, M.D., MPH, and Ana Avalos, M.D., partnered with CommUnity Care Health Centers to conduct a study of 645 Austin-area families between April to August 2020 who sought care at two CommUnityCare clinics. The study showed food insecurity affected families surveyed 33% to 70% during this time, with an average of 47%. The fluctuations corresponded to Travis County COVID-19 rates and hospitalizations, and with changes in the labor market.

Dr. Octavio N. Martinez Jr., executive director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, shares advice on cultivating resilience during a pandemic.

Dr. Jewel Mullen, associate dean for health equity at UT Austin's Dell Medical School, is one of the experts helping decide who should get a COVID-19 vaccine first. Dr. Mullen and 17 others served on a national committee recommending a four-phase approach to fairly distribute the vaccine.

UT Austin pharmacy professor Dr. Bill Williams is part of COVID-19 vaccine research that would not only change how it’s administered, but increase the vaccine’s shelf life in order to distribute it to areas without ultra-cold freezers.

UT Austin student entrepreneurs Allen Zhou, Aditi Merchant and Anthony Zhou realized that older adults — who struggle with loneliness in normal times — were suffering even more as retirement communities, assisted living facilities and nursing homes locked down and family and friends were denied visits. The trio decided to do something about it by launching Big & Mini, a nonprofit organization focused on connecting older adults (Bigs) and young people (Minis) through virtual communication.

Dr. Brandon Allport-Altillo, assistant professor in the departments of Population Health and Internal Medicine at UT Austin Dell Medical School, offers advice on how to alter your holiday traditions to minimize risk.

At least four of the COVID-19 vaccines showing promise are using technology developed in Jason McLellan's lab at UT Austin. Watch McLellan discuss next steps for the vaccine rollout and why he says he plans to vaccinate his entire family once one or more contenders are proved safe and effective for all ages.

An estimated one out of every six Texans — roughly 4.75 million people — has contracted COVID-19, according to a recent statistical analysis by the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. The study estimates that the virus is spreading rapidly and so far has infected more than 16 percent of people in Texas, far more than the state’s tally.

With COVID-19 cases hitting new highs across the country, a new online tool can help families and school leaders estimate how many infected people are likely to show up at a school on a given day anywhere in the United States. The free, interactive dashboard was produced by The University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.

UT Austin researchers, led by Jason McLellan, associate professor in molecular biosciences, are using their insight into the coronavirus “spike proteins” to help drive vaccines, treatments like antibody therapies and understanding of COVID-19’s resistance to treatments.

UT Austin researchers are in the middle of a study looking at where people get their health information, specifically on COVID-19, and if they trust it to be true. The results hopefully will help officials better understand the people they need to convince to follow health recommendations.

A new report from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at UT Austin provides groundbreaking data on the impact of COVID-19 in state-operated prisons and county-operated jails. According to the report, 231 people have died from COVID-19 in Texas prisons and jails — more than any other state in the country — and people in Texas prisons are testing positive for COVID at a rate 490% higher than for the state of Texas as a whole.

Doctors at UT Austin's Dell Medical School are taking a closer look at the long-term health effects of COVID-19 and working to create a post COVID-19 patient center to help pinpoint treatment and learn more about why symptoms persist.

Scientists at UT Austin have found that relationships have mostly continued much as they were before, with the happiest couples seeing a small boost. In a new study in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers found people’s overall satisfaction levels with their relationships changed little during the pandemic, even amid significant stressors, from job losses to health concerns.

Research led by Dev Niyogi, a professor at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering, is adding some clarity on weather’s role in COVID-19 infection, with a new study finding that temperature and humidity do not play a significant role in coronavirus spread. That means whether it’s hot or cold outside, the transmission of COVID-19 from one person to the next depends almost entirely on human behavior.

Every Friday, a group of molecular biosciences experts at UT Austin comes together in a virtual meeting to study and mitigate the effects of COVID-19. Led by Andrew Ellington, professor of molecular biosciences, founder of the Ellington Lab and holder of the Wilson M. and Kathryn Fraser Research Professorship in Biochemistry, the group includes a cohort of various undergraduate researchers in addition to the campus experts who discuss their findings for the week and share constructive feedback about their working scientific theories.

Construction workers have a much higher risk of becoming hospitalized with the novel coronavirus than non-construction workers, according to a new study from researchers with UT Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. Researchers found that construction workers were five times as likely to be hospitalized with the coronavirus as workers in other occupations. The finding closely matches forecasts the team made in April.

A study carried out by scientists from UT Austin and Houston Methodist Hospital involving more than 5,000 COVID-19 patients in Houston finds that the virus that causes the disease is accumulating genetic mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious. According to the recently published paper, that mutation, called D614G, is located in the spike protein that pries open cells for viral entry. It’s the largest peer-reviewed study of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences in one metropolitan region of the U.S. to date.

Thanks to new financial aid programs that cover tuition and provide additional support for low-income students, UT Austin enrolled one of its largest-ever classes of Pell Grant students this year while increasing the overall percentage of Pell Grant students enrolled as undergraduates. The increase comes at a crucial time for Texas families struggling with the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and bucks a national trend of declining college enrollments among low-income students. The higher numbers at Texas suggest the effectiveness of UT’s two latest financial aid expansions, the Texas Advanced Commitment and, new for this year, UT for Me – Powered by Dell Scholars.

Projections from the UT Austin's COVID-19 Modeling Consortium now show fewer people could be in the hospital in late November than are hospitalized right now. Recent cold weather could have fewer people outside and that combined with a downward trend in hospitalizations has the November outlook improving rapidly.

Based on the Austin and Travis County’s current transmission rates of the coronavirus, as many as 700 people could be in the hospital by the third week of November, according to projections from the UT Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.

The share of Texans who think that the coronavirus is a “significant crisis” continues to decrease, according to data from the latest in a series of polls by UT Austin measuring Texas attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic and Texans’ reported behavior in response to it.

UT Austin's COVID-19 Modeling Consortium shows 8% more infections in the "14-day change" category in the Austin area. For Texas, the Modeling Consortium says there are 18% more infections in the "14-day change" category.

When the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium sent out a request for help, over 150 UT Austin students rose to the occasion and applied for new positions across a dozen new projects. They will tackle challenges as varied as quantifying school reopening risks to simulating and analyzing vaccine trials.

A new study involving more than 5,000 COVID-19 patients in Houston finds that the virus that causes the disease is accumulating genetic mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious and easier to spread. The study was carried out by several UT Austin scientists, including visiting scholar Jimmy Gollihar, associate professors of molecular biosciences Jason S. McLellan and Ilya J. Finkelstein, and graduate students Chia-Wei Chou and Kamyab Javanmardi.

Many social norms from our pre-pandemic life are out and continually morphing as COVID-19 levels oscillate. Marci Gleason, a UT Austin professor and relationship expert whose research looks at how close relationships influence individuals’ ability to cope with stress and major life transitions, offers advice on how to work through challenges like these.

In response to community input, UT Austin is taking steps to make its dashboard even more useful by adding more detailed information across several new categories. The updated COVID-19 dashboard includes the following changes: dynamic date range slider, testing sources for cumulative cases, estimated active cases, semester total cumulative cases, cumulative 7-day moving average, expanded proactive community testing summary with positivity rates, and UT Austin clinical testing summary with positivity rates.

Researchers at UT Austin are monitoring the city's wastewater because, according to them, it is a leading indicator for COVID-19 spikes in the community. Suzanne Pierce, Ph.D., Kerry Kinney, Ph.D., and Mary Jo Kirisits, Ph.D., are all part of UT's Canary Team, testing wastewater in hopes of catching COVID-19 spikes sooner than tests would.

Being stuck in quarantine doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t meet new friends. At least that’s what Pop Social Inc. founder and CEO Yoon Lee believes. While a management information systems student at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business last year, Lee and his team launched Pop, a social app that aims to be a casual and hassle-free way for UT students to connect with others primarily through common interests.

Providing easy access to on-campus COVID-19 testing has been a critical component of a safe return to classes this fall at UT Austin. Students, faculty members and staffers have offered valuable feedback on how the testing process could improve. In response, UT Austin is rolling out various changes to facilitate the process, including no-appointment walk-up testing, easy form completion through a free app, one-stop comprehensive testing, and an incentive program to encourage further participation in proactive community testing.

The return of students to UT Austin this fall has the potential to amplify coronavirus transmission in the broader Austin area, according to new projections published Friday by the university’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.

A new study of the coronavirus reveals the continual accumulation of mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious, although the mutations do not appear to have made the virus deadlier or changed clinical outcomes. Led by Houston Methodist Hospital, scientists from UT Austin, Weill Cornell Medicine, the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory contributed to the study.

Lauren Ancel Meyers, professor of integrative biology at UT Austin and director of the COVID-19 modeling consortium, speaks about how Texas is doing with COVID-19 and what we can expect in coming weeks.

The McCombs School of Business at UT Austin has contracted with Austin-based Contextual Concept Group to create a new 3D immersive video solution that combines in-person, hybrid and online teaching to deliver an engaging and interactive distanced learning experience, including beaming a professor into the classroom as a hologram.

A new study conducted by researchers at UT Austin shows that the proportion of medical and biological scientific papers with female authors has declined during the pandemic.

UT Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium has launched a new online dashboard to track the spread and impact of the virus, including in hospitals across Texas, with detailed information for 22 areas, tracking ICU patients, standard hospitalizations and the COVID-19 effective reproduction number.

An antibody test for the virus that causes COVID-19, developed by researchers at UT Austin in collaboration with Houston Methodist and other institutions, is more accurate and can handle a much larger number of donor samples at lower overall cost than standard antibody tests currently in use. In the near term, the test can be used to accurately identify the best donors for convalescent plasma therapy and measure how well candidate vaccines and other therapies elicit an immune response.

As COVID-19’s spread across the U.S. prompted stay-at-home orders and business closures, the share of non-remote workers who lost their employment by early April was three times higher than the share of remote workers who lost their jobs, according to a study conducted by researchers from UT Austin and the University of Southern California. The study found that non-remote workers also experienced worse respiratory health than those who worked remotely.

People living in some of the largest U.S. cities and their surrounding areas face the highest risk of contracting COVID-19 in the near future, according to a new set of online dashboards created by researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin. The risk analysis model examines more than 3,000 U.S. counties scored on 13 different variables. It features three dashboards that focused on risk, exposure, and vulnerability.

Three UT Austin experts answer the UT community’s questions about the coronavirus, including safety of visiting an infant, reinfection, virus mutation and vaccine development. Specialists featured are  Lauren Ancel Meyers, epidemiologist and leader of the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, Greg Ippolito, research assistant professor of molecular biosciences and an expert on how our immune systems respond to pathogens, and Jason McLellan, associate professor of molecular biosciences whose team created a critical component in several COVID-19 vaccines currently in clinical trials.

A new study from researchers with the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium estimates 82 to 183 students may arrive infected during the first week of classes. UT officials say they are using this data to safely prepare ways to re-open campus, citing that extensive and rapid testing coupled with voluntary precautionary behavior can make reopening safer and more feasible.

UT Austin purchased three state-of-the-art robots and assembled additional equipment as part of a wide-reaching, in-house infrastructure built to ensure its on-campus community remains safe amid the pandemic. The investment will enable the university able test hundreds of symptomatic students, faculty and staff members every day, as well as an additional 5,000 each week who do not have symptoms — something known as proactive community testing — at no cost to them. The in-house facilities ensure the university can continue to test even if a surge in demand overwhelms private labs.

As the coronavirus pandemic subsides, businesses like banks, dentists’ offices and universities should give priority to reopening based on their comparatively low risk of transmission and high economic impact, according to a study produced by Avinash Collis, business professor at UT Austin. 

One of UT Austin’s signature initiatives, OnRamps, is partnering with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to include five free modules from OnRamps Distance Learning Catalog in TEA’s Strong Start resources to help prepare Texas middle and high school teachers to teach in distance or hybrid-learning environments. Interim President Jay Hartzell stated that “by providing resources to assist Texas middle and high school teachers with distance learning, we not only help them and their students navigate the pandemic, we also help those students continue to receive a high-quality education. This will ensure that they don’t miss a beat and continue to thrive now and in the future.”

In a new paper, epidemiological researchers from UT Austin estimated COVID-19 to be far more widespread in Wuhan, China, and Seattle, Washington, weeks ahead of lockdown measures in each city. Patients with undiagnosed flu symptoms who actually had COVID-19 last winter were among thousands of undetected early cases of the disease at the beginning of this year. In the U.S., about a third of the estimated undiagnosed cases were among children.

Researchers at UT Austin say that even when businesses are reopening in phases, data-driven decisions should be considered, especially when it comes to the impact that type of business has on Texas and the likelihood it could be a place of transmission.

UT Austin associate professor of molecular biosciences Jason McLellan and his team used their experience with respiratory viruses to quickly figure out the three-dimensional structure of the protein in the novel coronavirus. They reengineered it, developing a safe version of it for the body to recognize and respond to-- and the modification could enable much faster and more stable production of vaccines worldwide. They helped make history when their work led to the first COVID-19 vaccine being produced for human trials – in just 66 days after the genome sequence of the virus was published. Phase 1 of the vaccine's trial yielded promising results and will enter the final phase of human trials in late July, thanks in part to these scientists at UT Austin who laid the groundwork. A paper published in the journal Nature describes both preclinical results and important protein engineering led by the team.

Blood clots have emerged as one of an increasing number of deadly side effects of the novel coronavirus in some patients. Researchers at UT Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering are embarking on a project to learn more about the onset of thromboembolism, the obstruction of a blood vessel by a clot that can cause everything from strokes to heart attacks to pulmonary embolisms, as a result of COVID-19.

Henry Rossiter, a UT Austin computational engineering senior, has logged long hours working with a team of computer scientists, medical experts and engineers to build a mobile application that will help students and faculty safely return to campus this fall. The app, called Protect Texas Together, will allow people to track their symptoms, record COVID-19 test results, get connected to medical resources and — potentially, in the future — even assist in contact tracing. It will be available in the Apple App and Google Play stores starting in mid-August.

A UT Austin research team used cases per person data to make a model of how many infectious students would show up in schools in week one. The map breaks down the risk across the nation, county by county.

A forecast from UT Austin projects an escalating death toll through Aug. 20, at which point it predicts the number of daily fatalities will top 3,000, a mark that would be record-setting.

New estimates from researchers at UT Austin provide a rough gauge of the risk that students and educators could encounter at school in each county in the United States.

Some of the state’s top health care professionals and designers are searching for solutions to the coronavirus crisis in nursing homes. After the Austin City Council approved a resolution dedicating resources to long-term care facilities, UT Austin’s Design Institute for Health Executive Director Stacey Chang said they would begin looking at the root problems contributing to the spread of the virus and how to redesign the system to prevent it. Chang’s team has been working on the “Nursing Home System Study” alongside experts from the UT School of Nursing, the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, Austin Public Health and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

With communities throughout the United States combating surges in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, researchers at UT Austin and Northwestern University have created a framework that helps policymakers determine which data to track and when to take action to protect their communities. The model specifies a series of trigger points to help local entities know when to tighten social distancing measures to prevent hospitals from being overrun by virus patients. The method also aims to minimize the economic impact to communities by suggesting the earliest times for safely relaxing restrictions.

A collaborative group of more than 50 organizations in the academic, public and private sectors has formed the Texas Global Health Security Innovation Consortium (TEXGHS). Organized by Austin Technology Incubator at UT Austin, the consortium will coordinate efforts to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 and future pandemics by supporting innovators working toward pandemic readiness, response, recovery and resiliency.

A team of 20 undergraduates from UT Austin created a donation-based e-cookbook titled "Food: For the Love of Community" that offers easy recipes and guidance on how to maintain healthy food habits amid the COVID-19 crisis.

To help support the 1 in 4 Austin households struggling to put food on the table, The Spirit Golf Association is teaming up with UT Austin, UT’s Dell Medical School and community partners to provide healthy food for Central Texans during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. It will also help at-risk adults stay safe by avoiding crowded grocery stores and food pantries and will help create jobs for workers affected by the pandemic.

Scientists at UT Austin are using their novel thin-film-freezing technology to deliver remdesivir through dry powder inhalation, potentially making treatment more potent, easier to administer and more broadly available.

Modeling from UT Austin predicts a decline in daily COVID-19 hospitalizations and patients in intensive care units in the Austin-Round Rock metro area. UT’s models, which use hospitalization data and cellphone mobility data for the Austin area, also provide daily estimates for the rate of COVID-19 spread in the area. The model suggests that as hospitalizations began to surge, amid intense news coverage, more people followed best practices for preventing the virus and the transmission rate began declining, according to Spencer Fox, a research associate at the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. 

While industries around the world shut down during the pandemic, UT Austin’s McDonald Observatory continued operating—the only major optical astronomical observatory in the world to do so. The observatory also operated the only large optical telescope in the world that stayed online through the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As other observatories around the world are coming back online, they are looking to McDonald as a model for accessibility during a time when human contact is a health risk.

As the number of reported cases of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations was increasing in June, Texans expressed less concern about the threat of the virus than they did in April and were much less likely to stay home because of the pandemic, according to polling by the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin.

UT Austin has launched its own COVID-19 Test Results Dashboard that provides case numbers and testing and hospitalization data to the public, as well as information related to the outbreak for the university’s students and employees. The dashboard is the result of collaborative efforts by UT Austin’s University Health Services, UT Health Austin clinics, Occupational Health Program, Dell Medical School, and Austin Public Health.

UT Austin Dell Medical School professor Dr. Rama Thyagarajan, an infectious disease specialist, joined KUT for a livestreamed discussion about using plasma to treat the coronavirus, answering questions about the latest developments and the need for plasma donors who have recovered from COVID-19 to help treat patients who are sick now.

With another wave of the coronavirus likely to appear right as we get into flu season, there’s an urgent need for diagnostics that can differentiate between COVID-19 and influenza. Researchers at UT Austin are now developing a new sensor that can tell the difference between the two illnesses and test for both simultaneously.

High school students who apply to UT Austin for fall 2021 undergraduate admission will not be required to submit an ACT or SAT test score as part of their application. This change will allow the university to better serve potential students by ensuring that testing limitations related to COVID-19 do not affect a student’s ability to apply.

Oralia Loza, Ph.D., public health sciences associate professor at UT El Paso, and the Borderland Rainbow Center (BRC) have collaborated on a survey that examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected the LGBTQ+ population in Texas. Led by Phillip W. Schnarrs, Ph.D., at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School, the survey involved a statewide coalition of community and research partners, including UTEP and El Paso’s BRC, to better understand the needs, concerns and challenges of LGBTQ+ Texans and their allies during the coronavirus outbreak.

Through a $60,000 grant from the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at UT Austin, the Dell Medical School has launched a mental health hotline for health care workers working on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

UT Austin researchers argue that information scientists have a bigger role to play in the crisis because of the proliferation of conflicting messages. They outline their ideas in a recent opinion paper published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Three of the authors share their perspectives on the pandemic.

Elizabeth Matsui, M.D., MHS, a professor in the departments of population health and pediatrics at Dell Medical School, debunks myths that some people cite in defending why masks do not need to be worn during the coronavirus pandemic.

A new study finds that wearing face masks may be the central variable that determines the spread of the virus. The study was conducted by a team from UT Austin, Texas A&M University, California Institute of Technology, and the University of California San Diego.

UT Austin students from the Cockrell School of Engineering are stepping up to help testing companies in the Austin area. Graduate students are working part-time at companies producing and analyzing coronavirus tests, in addition to their current research projects in a campus lab, where they focus on infectious disease protein therapies and vaccines. (6/12/20)

The country’s first peer-reviewed study of a COVID-19 treatment that transfuses blood plasma from recovered patients into critically ill patients shows 19 out of 25 patients improving, including 11 discharged from the hospital. Houston Methodist Hospital was the first academic medical center in the U.S. to transfuse plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients into two critically ill patients. Collaborators at UT Austin developed an antibody test and selected recovered patients with the highest levels of antibody response for donation.

Texas Global, which serves as the international office for UT Austin, has partnered with the school's Counseling and Mental Health Center to offer webinars for international students on coping strategies to help navigate isolation and manage stress caused by the pandemic. Support for international students also includes offering career support, food and emergency housing assistance, and advice on changing immigration policies and procedures.

As COVID-19 continues to spread across Texas and the nation, scientists from the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences at UT Austin and the University of Houston have created a mapping tool for determining which populations in Houston and the city’s surrounding areas appear most vulnerable to the infection.

A new study from researchers at UT Austin has found that some antivirals are useful for more than helping sick people get better — they also can prevent thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of virus cases if used in the early stages of infection.

In a new paper from epidemiological researchers at UT Austin, an analysis of COVID-19 outbreaks in 58 cities has found that places that took longer to begin implementing social distancing measures spent more time with the virus rapidly spreading than others that acted more quickly.

People’s social lives aren’t what they used to be. But exactly how they’ve changed and what it might mean for mental health is what psycho-linguistic researchers at UT Austin are trying to figure out in the Pandemic Project.

Access to vaccines around the world could get easier thanks to scientists in the College of Pharmacy at UT Austin who have developed an inexpensive and innovative vaccine delivery method that preserves live viruses, bacteria, antibodies and enzymes without refrigeration.

In a new study, psychology researchers at UT Austin confirmed that people can be heavily influenced by others, especially when it comes to taking on prosocial behavior — actions designed to benefit society as a whole. Understanding this is important now, when large-scale cooperation and adoption of protective behaviors — wearing face masks and avoiding gatherings — have important implications for the well-being of entire communities, the researchers said.

A 4-year-old llama named Winter could be critical to finding a treatment for COVID-19, UT Austin researchers say. The researchers linked two copies of a special kind of antibody produced by llamas to create a new antibody. Initial tests show the antibody blocks viruses that have the spike protein found in the coronavirus. 

Dr. Rama Thyagarajan, an assistant professor of internal medicine at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School and an infectious disease specialist, said those who are considering going to the gym need to think about whether doing so could risk their health, but offers key things to look out for in a recently reopened gym to keep them safe. 

Scientists have isolated a special antibody from llamas that could prevent or treat COVID-19 and be delivered via an inhaler, according to a new study co-led by Jason McLellan, a biochemist at UT Austin. 

Research from the McLellan Lab at UT Austin has paved the way for a significant development in creating a vaccine for COVID-19. In February, the UT researchers created a 3D model of the spikes on the virus, providing a roadmap that companies are using to develop and test possible vaccines. 

Addison Allen, a junior at UT Austin, is a volunteer contact tracer. She founded a group called CLEAN, which stands for COVID-19 Longhorn Epidemiological Assistance Network. CLEAN volunteers have, so far, contributed about 500 hours of contact tracing.

As isolation causes a rise in cases of anxiety and depression in children, UT Austin’s Dell Medical School is hoping its newly formed Child Psychiatry Access Network will assist Texas pediatricians with their young patients.

As Texas starts to head into the next phase of our new normal, many vulnerable populations are still struggling to access food and other supplies. These four UT Austin student startups have stepped up to help mitigate this crisis and continue to help those in need across Texas.

UT Austin researcher Junfeng Jiao is using AI algorithms to predict the spread of COVID-19 through the New York state transportation system. 

A group of researchers at UT Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering are pursuing a plan to do something a lot of us would like to: incinerate the novel coronavirus. The researchers plan to use a modified, electric motor-powered diesel engine that can suck up air and essentially burn up SARS-CoV-2 particles that cause COVID-19 through compression heating. If the experiment is successful, it could have major implications for protecting people from the virus in busy places like hospitals and grocery stores. 

In response to the growing demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) in health institutions, the Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing (PharmE3D) Lab at UT Austin is using its 3D-printing resources to fabricate face shields for Dell Medical School and other health institutions. The project, called RAPID Shield, leverages the lab’s quick turnaround to meet demand until stocks can be replenished.

The inaugural class of UT Austin’s Dell Medical School is set to graduate May 21. After students were pulled from clinical rotations due to safety concerns related to the pandemic, Dell Med quickly created virtual courses to help the students get their credits and graduate on time.

UT Austin students launched Fuel Our Heroes to raise money for hospital personnel. The organization has raised over $130,000 for personal protective equipment, food and overtime hours for frontline health care workers at hospitals in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago and Denver, in addition to UT Health Austin, the clinical practice of UT Austin’s Dell Medical School. 

Addison Allen, a UT Austin junior majoring in public health, formed the COVID Longhorn Epidemiological Assistance Network (CLEAN) in March to give UT students an opportunity to help with the Austin pandemic response.

UT Health San Antonio researchers are collaborating with a team from UT Austin to build a new type of ventilator made of inexpensive, widely available materials to help fill the demand created by the spread of COVID-19 for these critical devices that help patients breathe.

UT Austin’s Dell Medical School is teaming up with Austin Public Health, CommUnityCare Health Centers and the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO) to help limit the spread of COVID-19 among people experiencing homelessness by providing a safe place to self-quarantine and receive health care. 

UT Austin engineering researchers are teaming up with a group from the University of Florida to infuse chemicals in soap into face masks, enhancing their ability to protect people from SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 disease it causes. 

Students from the Butler School of Music did not let social distancing stop them from continuing to be creative together. Less Than <10 is a group of UT Austin musicians scattered across the country who livestream concerts on Twitch to raise hope and awareness for musicians struggling during this time of uncertainty. 

With many schools closed through the end of the school year, many families and teachers are looking for resources to support learning from home. Several outreach programs in the College of Natural Sciences and at UT Austin are supporting STEM learning from afar. 

Connecting with nature is a great way to relax and focus on something nourishing in the midst of the stress of the pandemic. Andrea DeLong-Amaya, the director of horticulture at the UT Austin Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, shares some tips for how to safely connect with nature while staying close to home. 

Kristin Neff, UT associate professor of educational psychology, shares tips on supporting yourself emotionally through the coronavirus pandemic. 

UT fitness expert CieCie Leonard shares five tips on staying motivated and moving while social distancing. 

A consortium at UT Austin released a model that tries to correct what the Texas researchers see as flaws in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecast. The IHME model predicts the U.S. already passed its peak of coronavirus deaths this week; the Texas model found there is only a 17 percent chance the peak has passed and an 80 percent chance the peak will happen by May 7. 

The White House has enlisted some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers in the battle against COVID-19, including the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin. COVID-19 researchers have already started using Frontera, and this new designation highlights the supercomputer as a key resource within the new High Performance Computing Consortium, a public-private partnership that will provide researchers worldwide with massive computing resources as they combat the virus.

Dr. Doug Kiel, professor of public and nonprofit management in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at UT Dallas, shares tips on how employers can help reduce anxiety and stress in their workers upon their return to the workplace.

A team of researchers at UT Dallas led by Dr. Shalini Prasad, head of bioengineering and the Cecil H. and Ida Green Professor in Systems Biology Science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, is working on a small, wearable device that could be a big breakthrough in helping doctors head off one of the deadliest complications of COVID-19. It can be worn like an activity tracker, but it’s designed to detect the beginnings of what’s called a cytokine storm, using a color-coded system to let you know if something is off. 

New research by UT Dallas scientists could help solve a major challenge in the deployment of certain COVID-19 vaccines worldwide — the need for the vaccines to be kept at below-freezing temperatures during transport and storage. In a new study, researchers demonstrate a new, inexpensive technique that generates crystalline exoskeletons around delicate liposomes and other lipid nanoparticles and stabilizes them at room temperature for an extended period — up to two months — in their proof-of-concept experiments. 

After last year’s plans were upended by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Alternative Spring Break program at UT Dallas returned this spring in a virtual format, allowing Comets to find new ways to give back and help their community during the pandemic. This year, 66 students were divided into seven teams that tackled a total of 21 projects that impacted areas such as animal services, hunger and homelessness, LGBTQ and ally services, immigration, and sustainability.

UT Southwestern Medical Center has opened a new community COVID-19 vaccination site on the UT Dallas campus. The site will provide vaccinations for both UTSW patients and community members, including UTD Comets, who meet current eligibility criteria set by the Texas Department of State Health Services.

UT Dallas researchers recently stepped in to assist with a necessary resource for widespread COVID-19 vaccination efforts in North Texas — ultracold freezer storage. Two of the available vaccines must be stored at temperatures well below freezing, and as greater numbers of vaccines are being shipped to municipal and regional hubs for distribution, safe storage is critical. UT Dallas volunteered by sharing ultracold storage equipment (that met Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines) to store vaccines for Grand Prairie and Collin County.

Angela Shoup, a professor of speech, language and hearing at UT Dallas and president of the American Academy of Audiology, explains how the pandemic has brought to the surface many people’s unknown hearing problems, as “they are having to cope with trying to understand people that wear masks.”

Medical and ethics experts on a panel hosted by UT Dallas discussed the fears that some people have about the COVID-19 vaccines, but urged individuals to seek out reliable information about the vaccines.

The latest vaccine data for Texas shows females are the most vaccinated group, as well as Asian residents. Dr. Tim Bray, the director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research at UT Dallas, explains why the latest data shows variations among groups receiving COVID-19 vaccines. 

Dr. Tim Bray, the director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research at UT Dallas, explains the logistics involved in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and how the effort is going so far.

Dr. Tim Bray, the director for the Institute for Urban Policy Research at UT Dallas, crunched the numbers to try to determine when the COVID-19 vaccine could be available for a majority of the public. At the current distribution rate, Bray calculated that it will likely take a year to hit the target of vaccinating 80% of Texas’ population. 

The availability of adequate health care facilities is one of the most important factors that public-health policymakers grapple with when preparing for infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID-19. And one of the most critical resources for controlling infectious respiratory diseases is the negative-pressure isolation room (NPIR). In a new study, Dr. Dohyeong Kim, associate professor of public policy and political economy and of geospatial information sciences in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at UT Dallas investigated the allocation process and spatial distribution of NPIRs in South Korea during past outbreaks.

Misty Owens, who teaches the UTDance Ensemble at UT Dallas, created a dance video that provides a social outlet for Parkinson patients to combat depression and help maintain flexibility and balance even as the neurological disease progresses.

Neuroscientist Theodore Price, who studies pain at UT Dallas, says nerve infection could contribute to acute, as well as lasting, symptoms of COVID. In a recent study published in the journal Pain, Price and his team found that SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, may gain access to the nervous system through entry into neurons that form free nerve endings at the outermost layers of skin and luminal organs. In another recent study, Price, who is director of the Center for Advanced Pain Studies, a component of UT Dallas’ School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, led a team that identified interactions between the immune system and nerves in the lungs that can cause rapid deterioration in a COVID-19 patient’s condition.

Two faculty members from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas have examined how manufacturers are — or aren’t — pivoting successfully in response to major manufacturing disruptions as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study found that manufacturing response to the disruption has been largely reactive and uncoordinated, and many firms’ crisis communication plans do not include managing an infectious-disease outbreak.

Driven by the mental health effects of the pandemic, a group of UT Dallas students decided to reach out to local senior citizens with care packages and handwritten notes. Their volunteer effort, called COVID Check-In, has distributed more than 700 care packages to senior living communities in Collin County.

With millions of Americans working from home and many children learning at home, your internet service may have slowed to a crawl. Dr. Ravi Prakash, a professor of computer science at UT Dallas provides tips to help make working or learning from home more efficient.

Researchers at UT Dallas are debunking the notion that COVID-19 is a purely respiratory virus by shedding light on how the nervous system might be contributing to the disease. Their new study points to a neuroimmune interaction as the driving force behind certain COVID-19 symptoms, such as headaches, delirium and bodily aches and pains, many of which they suspect could result in long-term neurological issues.

The Office of Research and the Office of Graduate Education partnered to establish the Master’s Research Fellowship Program, which encourage UT Dallas master’s students to engage in research across a wide range of disciplines. Recognizing the COVID-19 pandemic has left many students in financial difficulty, the fellowship program not only provides educational opportunities but also a crucial infusion of resources.

Dr. Tim Bray, director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research at UT Dallas, and his team have created a COVID-19 dashboard for North Texas.

Fourteen scientists from the Center for Advanced Pain Studies, a component of UT Dallas’ School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, collaborated on a project to determine if pulmonary issues associated with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, originates with the nervous system. The results of their study, published online June 1 in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, identified interactions between the immune system and nerves in the lungs that can cause rapid deterioration in a COVID-19 patient’s condition. Some of these interactions might be countered by existing drugs.

UT Dallas faculty are working to remove obstacles and reduce uncertainty for international students considering UTD graduate programs this fall.

A study by researchers at UT Dallas have found that incidents of domestic violence in Dallas increased in the three weeks after local stay-at-home orders went into effect in response to the coronavirus pandemic, then they gradually declined.

After Texas ordered people to shelter in place in late March, Sarah Messiah and her colleagues at the UT Dallas School of Public Health surveyed their obese patients to find out how they were adapting and whether they had been infected by COVID-19. The results were worse than expected.

With on-campus activities still suspended due to COVID-19, UT Dallas is helping new students become acclimated to university life — even at a distance — through its first virtual orientations. Staff have transitioned all orientations for new freshmen and transfer students as well as new international students to online formats.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an urgent need for sharing patient data to help scientists learn more about the virus and how to stop it from spreading. But health providers must also protect patient privacy. Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu, a professor of computer science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas, along with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, received a $200,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s Rapid Response Research (RAPID) program to create an open-source software tool to help policymakers and health care providers determine the details they can share without violating patient privacy.

Two Terry Scholars students at UT Dallas have established the nonprofit organization COOKED-19  to purchase meals from local restaurants and donate and deliver them to hospital personnel in cities most impacted by COVID-19. Their efforts have been backed by a grant from the Victor L. Worsfold Grant Program Fund, which was established by UT Dallas’ Eugene McDermott Scholars Program Alumni Association to support student-led service activities providing creative solutions to community problems, and a grant from RevTech Ventures, a retail technology venture capital firm in Dallas.

Students at UT Dallas who seek academic support to be successful can access from home the resources they need from the Student Success Center. The center’s staff and student leaders this spring transitioned their face-to-face academic support operation to digital services, offering peer tutoring, supplemental instruction, peer-led team learning, a writing center, communications lab, academic coaching and the Institute for Peer Mentoring workshops.

To contribute to the public battle with COVID-19, UT Dallas faculty, staff and students have built different websites that track current coronavirus health data and model future scenarios. Researchers from the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, the School of Economics, Political and Policy Sciences, the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, and the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics developed the dashboards so that government entities and the general public can access the same data.

Debra Greszler, a member of the UT Dallas Staff Council and a manager in the Office of Information Technology, volunteered to lead the university effort to provide two reusable, washable face coverings to each employee who regularly reports to campus to perform essential job duties. UT Dallas staff, faculty, students, family, alumni, and university retirees donated supplies and sewed the masks for employees.

The Institute for Urban Policy Research at UT Dallas is trying to help North Texans get a clearer picture of the COVID-19 cases in their area by providing a 12-county overview of the number of active cases, recoveries and deaths. 

After the UT Dallas campus closed due to COVID-19, the Callier Center quickly developed and implemented a telehealth model so that patients could continue to access audiologists, speech-language pathologists and clinical staff. The new telehealth program also enables graduate students training to be audiologists and speech-language pathologists to continue earning clinical hours. 

UT Dallas researchers have designed and 3D-printed a critical ventilator part and are working to manufacture testing swabs and personal protective equipment in a campus lab mobilized to address potential supply shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brain experts at the UT Dallas Center for BrainHealth offer four science-backed tips to boost brain health during this time of stress, uncertainty and isolation. 

The Institute for Urban Policy Research at UT Dallas has compiled data on COVID-19 in North Texas to enable residents and policymakers to make more informed and timely decisions. Director Tim Bray explains how three new interactive websites will be used to help track COVID-19 in the region.

Students in a new sustainability service learning class at UT Dallas have put their knowledge to work with a virtual fundraising and donation campaign called #WhooshAwayHunger to support the North Texas Food Bank during the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Researchers at UT Dallas are close to finishing a years-long project to develop rapid and sensitive diagnostic tests for respiratory viruses like the novel coronavirus.

UT Dallas and SMU are teaming up with RevTech, a retail technology venture capital firm, on a challenge grant for solutions aimed at a new “safe normal” on higher ed campuses. RevTech will award $5,000 grants to students with the best ideas for virus suppression at universities and colleges. 

While theater companies and musical organizations around the country are shutting down productions during the COVID-19 pandemic, UT Dallas’ theatre program creatively improvised to transform the “Faust” stage play into a radio play, complete with music, audio effects and a robust website to provide the audience with the feel of the play’s period. 

With stay at home orders still in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many Texans will spend another week working from home and making sure kids at home are doing schoolwork. Several subject matter experts at the Center for Brain Health at UT Dallas have put together short videos providing tips on reasoning and resilience to help brain health and performance during these stressful times. 

Dr. Britt Berrett, director of the Center for Healthcare Leadership and Management at UT Dallas, speaks on the lessons hospitals are learning during this evolving global pandemic crisis.

UT Dallas launched a new site that features the positive ways the UTD community has united during COVID-19 and will include a video every Friday in a new series, “Friday Night Brights.”

Josefina “Josie” Carmona, Ph.D., adjunct professor, and Irma Montelongo, Ph.D., associate professor of practice and online program coordinator, faculty members in UT El Paso’s Chicano studies program, recently won the 2021 Award of Distinction from the City University of New York’s (CUNY) John Jay College of Criminal Justice Latin American and Latinx Studies Department. Faculty in CUNY’s Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies unanimously selected the two in recognition of their efforts, commitment and contributions to the department’s Hispanic Serving While Online training and research project during the pandemic.

Drug discovery researchers at UT El Paso and the University of New Mexico have leveraged their expertise to develop a rapid online tool to accelerate the discovery of drug therapies for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The machine learning models developed in the study were built on Frontera and Stampede2 supercomputing clusters operated by UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center. 

A grant awarded by the Paso del Norte Health Foundation is helping the UT El Paso Border Biomedical Research Center continue its efforts to promote important COVID-19-related information – including how to navigate testing and vaccination services – to underserved communities in rural west El Paso County and southern Doña Ana County.

A UT El Paso study found that food insecurity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an increased demand for emergency food assistance in El Paso County, particularly in households located in downtown El Paso and in communities outside the city.

In January 2021, UT El Paso received doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for current students, faculty and staff. The university began administering the first COVID-19 vaccines January 22. In April, the university announced it will make free COVID-19 vaccines available to the public at UTEP’s vaccination clinic.

UT El Paso joined Morehouse School of Medicine's National COVID-19 Resiliency Network of strategic partners to inform community-driven response, recovery and resiliency strategies for addressing the impact of COVID-19 on communities.

Sreenath Chalil Madathil, Ph.D., assistant professor in industrial manufacturing and systems engineering at UT El Paso, is working to streamline the process and ease the patient experience at COVID-19 vaccination clinics in the United States to ensure faster vaccine distribution.

Paso del Norte Health Foundation has enlisted help from trained community health workers to dispel myths in growing number of communities in West Texas and Southern New Mexico. As part of the Reduce the Risk campaign, Dr. Theodore Cooper, associate professor of psychology at UT El Paso, oversaw focus groups where he observed that “despite there being no evidence supporting either claim, participants indicated they did not believe the vaccines were safe because they were developed so quickly, while others worried that vaccines developed using mRNA technology, like the popular Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, may alter their own DNA.”

UT El Paso’s COVID-19 vaccination program may soon serve as a model for immunization efforts in Chihuahua, Mexico’s largest state. At a vaccination site at UT El Paso, President Heather Wilson pointed out that “some of the students who were vaccinating other students here, live in Juárez. And so it’s a very close relationship. It has been for a very long time. And we’re very happy to help as Juárez and the state of Chihuahua sets up their vaccination program.”

A study by physiology researchers at UT El Paso found that El Paso’s stay-at-home ordinance due to the COVID-19 pandemic had positive effects on the health and well-being of the region’s residents. Despite a shutdown of gyms and movement restrictions on non-essential activities, residents increased their fitness activity and closely monitored their food and nutrition intake, said Cory M. Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of kinesiology in UTEP’s College of Health Sciences and the study’s principal investigator.

UT El Paso’s Center for Simulation allows nursing students to practice clinical and critical-thinking skills in a safe learning environment before interacting with real patients. After the COVID-19 pandemic caused the UTEP School of Nursing to transition from in-person instruction to remote learning, students were able to practice their nursing skills on a digital standardized patient, a human-like avatar with whom students interact to practice their communication, physical assessment and documentation skills.

An effort led by Lin Li, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics at UT El Paso, in collaboration with students and faculty from Howard University, has identified key variants that help explain the differences between the viruses that cause COVID-19 and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) -- critically important for the development of new vaccines and therapeutics.

Members of UT El Paso’s Coronavirus Proactive Testing and Vaccination programs began receiving the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine Monday, December 28, thanks to the university’s ongoing partnership with Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso (TTUHSC El Paso). This is the latest example of how the two institutions are collaborating to make a positive impact on the well-being of the region they both serve.

Emergence Health Network, together with the UT El Paso Athletics Department and its student athletes, created a video to share with the community about the "holiday blues," along with tips to get through the tough time.

A new research grant from the National Institutes of Health will support UT El Paso’s efforts to increase access to COVID-19 testing for populations disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Heather Wilson, president of UT El Paso, and Richard Lange, president of Texas Tech University Health Science Center El Paso, explain how employing multiple strategies simultaneously provides the best chance to suppress the disease.

Students, faculty and alumni from UT El Paso were part of an international art effort to honor health care workers who risk their lives daily in service of COVID-19 patients. The Hand Medal Project is a collaboration of more than 3,000 artists from 66 countries to produce hand-shaped medals to honor health care workers who serve COVID-19 patients. UTEP-affiliated artists produced 314 of the medals and delivered them to El Paso-area health professionals.

Jayajit Chakraborty, Ph.D., a professor in UT El Paso’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology and director of UTEP’s Socio-Environmental and Geospatial Analysis Lab, will investigate whether people with disabilities, particularly socially disadvantaged people with disabilities, are overrepresented in communities with higher COVID-19 prevalence.

According to the most recent report released by the Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness at UT El Paso, the economy is showing some signs of recovery in the region, even as the COVID-19 pandemic and surge continues.

Under normal circumstances, hundreds of UT El Paso students from different health disciplines would participate in-person in an Interprofessional Education (IPE) experience, working collaboratively to address the health care needs of an imaginary patient from a vulnerable population. But the coronavirus outbreak upended UTEP’s plan to organize an in-person IPE activity in 2020. They adapted by using telehealth and holding virtual interdisciplinary simulation exercises. An October virtual event involved over 350 students from nursing, occupational therapy, pharmacy, physical therapy, rehabilitation counseling, social work, speech-language pathology and the medical school working together on different case studies.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board recently approved a new postgraduate certificate in the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner concentration at UT El Paso. The certificate program will help address the critical need for more mental health providers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, said UTEP School of Nursing Dean Leslie K. Robbins, Ph.D.

UT El Paso and the City of El Paso have formed a partnership to help the community get tested for COVID-19. UTEP will host a free drive-through state testing site open to the public on campus.

UT El Paso launched a COVID-19 data dashboard last week, joining other Texas public universities, including the UT System's flagship campus in Austin, in publicly posting the number of positive cases among its campus community.

Theater administrators and faculty members at UT El Paso have announced artistic alternatives for the live performances that were canceled last spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting in September, students will participate in virtual performances scheduled by the Department of Theatre and Dance as well as the UTEP Dinner Theatre throughout the fall 2020 semester. Patrons may enjoy the events via the internet or, with a nod to the past, their radio.

UT El Paso continues to innovate its accommodations process to create a more inclusive environment where all students can thrive amid the social distancing measures brought about by the pandemic. UTEP's Center for Accommodations and Support Services (CASS) launched cassportal.utep.edu, the Accessible Information Management (AIM) system that serves as the office’s virtual front desk. Students with a disability or a temporary disability can request an accommodation through an easy-to-use system that initiates contact with a CASS staff member.

Suman Sirimulla, Ph.D., assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the UT El Paso School of Pharmacy, was awarded $80,000 from the National Science Foundation through UTEP’s Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials Center for Advanced Materials Research to support his research to develop antiviral drugs that will target COVID-19.

The STEMGrow Program, a groundbreaking initiative between UT and El Paso Community College that has successfully stewarded students between the two institutions, continues to bridge gaps between faculty and students forced to be physically distant this summer by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A team of physicians and engineers developed a hands-free resuscitator bag compression device that can be utilized as an emergency ventilator during the COVID-19 pandemic. The collaboration includes researchers from UT El Paso and Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, with contributions from Bessel, Ansys and Stratasys. The Texas Breather is designed to fall into the FDA’s new category of devices that qualify for emergency use authorization.

Oralia Loza, Ph.D., public health sciences associate professor at UT El Paso, and the Borderland Rainbow Center (BRC) have collaborated on a survey that examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected the LGBTQ+ population in Texas. Led by Phillip W. Schnarrs, Ph.D., at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School, the survey involved a statewide coalition of community and research partners, including UTEP and El Paso’s BRC, to better understand the needs, concerns and challenges of LGBTQ+ Texans and their allies during the coronavirus outbreak.

Armadillo-like animals called pangolins may have played a role in the emergence in humans of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, but they weren't the only links in animal-to-human transmission, scientists say. Researchers at UT El Paso, Duke University School of Medicine, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and New York University are studying the virus that causes COVID-19, and their research sheds new light on how it was able to make the leap from animals to people.

Active coping, denial, emotional support, humor and religion are among the coping strategies that help people with chronic conditions and disabilities deal with stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recently published study written by researchers at UT El Paso.

A new agreement between UT El Paso, the City of El Paso and Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso will enable UTEP to help the city Department of Public Health with COVID-19 testing. At the city’s request, UTEP purchased FDA-approved equipment that can process about 500 COVID-19 samples in an eight-hour day, enabling the city to assess more samples overnight and get results to patients more quickly.

The Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center (TMAC), a manufacturing consulting center based at UT El Paso, is leveraging its relationships with partners to outfit the El Paso community and others with critical supplies, such as medical masks and gowns, needed in the fight against COVID-19. TMAC is helping organizations and businesses nationwide connect with manufacturers that can fill the need for medical devices and medical services, including personal protective equipment (PPE).

After UT El Paso transitioned to distance learning in March, the University Career Center quickly launched the Virtual Career Center, which includes links to resume and cover letter virtual reviews, virtual interview tips, links to job postings and video tutorials to help students reach their professional goals. 

UT El Paso President Heather Wilson was one of 14 university presidents who joined Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Dr. Deborah Birx from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a teleconference call on May 13 to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the nation’s institutions of higher education and plans to reopen campuses.

The coronavirus pandemic has increased anxieties among caregivers of people with forms of dementia, so the West Texas Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association partnered with UT El Paso to offer virtual workshops to help ease those fears. A pair of UTEP faculty members have volunteered to help the chapter promote and execute “Mindful Bridges,” a four-part social engagement series for caretakers of people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

Twenty-five students in UT El Paso’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program chose to complete their clinical training in El Paso hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are among 75 nursing students expected to earn their degrees on May 16.

The National Science Foundation has approved a $114,000 RAPID award to UT El Paso’s April Gile Thomas, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology, to research the effect of COVID-19 on at-risk youth. 

Student teachers from UT El Paso helped area school districts transition to online delivery formats, thanks in part to the preparation they received at UTEP.

A team of UT Permian Basin students and a microbiologist put together a controlled experiment to take a closer look at whether or not masks prevent the spread of droplets. The results were clear that masks do prevent the spread of airborne droplets.

Two top academicians at UT Permian Basin are among many that have stepped in to help with clinical needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During these unprecedented times, UTPB professors have teamed up to give back. Every Wednesday morning during the month of May, the professors will head to the local food bank to fill boxes with food for the growing number of families in need in West Texas. The faculty at UT Permian Basin continue to exemplify the generosity and compassion.

UT Permian Basin is waiving testing requirements for admissions to remove barriers for students who may not have access to testing or transcripts. UTPB also is identifying resources and funds for emergency grants and scholarships to help students find a way to go to college.

The College of Engineering at UT Permian Basin helped create a booth that will allow medical personnel to test for COVID-19 without using PPE. 

UT Permian Basin’s chemistry department is mixing up their own solution of hand sanitizer. UTPB Chemistry Department Chair Dr. Milka Montes was joined by Mikayla Rodriguez, undergraduate student researcher at UTPB, and together they created Falcon Hand Sanitizer to be given to local first responders. 

UT Permian Basin President Sandra Woodley reflects on how UTPB adjusted to the demands of coronavirus mitigation, shares her thoughts on the impact of a potential recession, and discusses the importance of supporting students now and those who will be coming due to job loss.

UT Permian Basin is working closely with Medical Center Health System and Odessa Regional Medical Center to provide housing during the COVID-19 response for those who need it most: local medical providers and first responders.

The Ector County Commissioners Court on Monday voted to partner with UTPB’s nursing department to help tackle COVID-19. Nursing students will be able to get their clinical hours by helping the county trace down those who may have been exposed to the virus.

UT Permian Basin engineers along with Texas Tech University Health Science Center faculty have designed prototypes for two important medical devices: face shields and splitters used for ventilators.

Students in Dr. Noreen Rivera’s American and Mexican American literature and cultural studies classes at UT Rio Grande Valley are preserving the stories of Latinos affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The oral histories will become part of a digital collection called Voces of a Pandemic, now housed in the university library’s Special Collections and Archives. 

UT Rio Grande Valley Health reached a milestone by testing more than 100,000 individuals for COVID-19. Dr. John Thomas, director of the UT Health RGV Clinical Laboratory, said the university’s efforts have been critical to helping protect the Valley community during the pandemic.

All eligible UT Rio Grande Valley students who enroll in at least six credit hours or more for Summer 2021 may receive up to $500 for tuition and mandatory fees, as part of the university’s Summer Liftoff program. The initiative is another way UTRGV is helping students mitigate the challenges and disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic so they can continue their education and earn a degree.

Nursing students at UT Rio Grande Valley spent their spring break administering COVID-19 vaccines to the community.

A Harvard University expert on COVID-19 statistics and data will be the distinguished speaker March 19 at a UT Rio Grande Valley virtual colloquium, hosted by the UTRGV School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences and will be free and open to the public via Zoom link. Dr. Xihong Lin, from Harvard’s Department of Biostatistics, will speak on “Learning from COVID-19 Data on Transmission, Health Outcomes, Interventions and Vaccinations.”

UT Rio Grande Valley’s annual Festival of International Books & Arts (FESTIBA), an educational and entertaining event that promotes literacy and appreciation of reading for all ages, started on Feb. 20 and will run through March 13 this year. The theme is “Building Resilience Through Arts and Literacy,” centering around how powerful the arts are and how important they are, even in the most stressful of times like the current pandemic. With the transformative power of the arts and their ability to foster resilience, FESTIBA 2021 will examine and highlight the use of the creative process to find comfort during times of struggle and promote a sense of emotional and psychological well-being.

The UT Health RGV Clinical Laboratory this month is expanding as a comprehensive diagnostics lab with a range of testing capabilities well beyond COVID-19 samples. The expanded lab is designed, in part, to help shorten wait times for laboratory results in the Valley that otherwise would have to be sent out of state. It also expands the kinds of tests it can process. The lab – since April 2020 and the onset of the pandemic – has provided results for more than 90,000 COVID-19 test swabs and antibody tests for the Valley and the state of Texas.

UT Rio Grande Valley and the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium are partnering to help area adolescents address the mental health challenges they may be facing, especially amid the challenges of the pandemic.

UT Rio Grande Valley received 1,950 COVID-19 vaccines that were administered to the university’s healthcare providers and support staff in December. UT Health RGV continued to strengthen frontline personnel by administering the COVID-19 vaccine to EMS providers from across the Rio Grande Valley who engage in 9-1-1 emergency services like pre-hospital care and transport. As UT Health RGV prepares to receive and administer more COVID-19 vaccines, university medical and physician assistant students are volunteering to help administer the long-awaited vaccine. Vaccine distribution spanned the Rio Grande Valley, including in Mercedes, Harlingen, and Brownsville. The UTRGV School of Medicine began to administer the second round of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine in early January. 

Dr. John Krouse, dean of the UT Rio Grande School of Medicine, answers questions on the vaccine and how it will be distributed, assuaging concerns and providing insights in an effort to combat misinformation and conspiracy theories about the vaccine rollout, something he says he’s genuinely concerned about.

For Joann González, a 20-year-old UT Rio Grande Valley Theater and Film major, the COVID-19 pandemic affected her family in various ways – but one of the hardest was not being able to visit her grandfather. Now her film, “A Series of Windows,” about the struggle with social distancing during the pandemic, has been selected to be part of the 40th International VGIK Festival in Moscow, Russia.

UT Rio Grande Valley recently won a Texas Social Media Award, highlighting its work on keeping the university community informed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Texas Social Media Research Institute awarded UTRGV first place in the public universities category, recognizing their engaging messages and overall efforts to keep their faculty, staff and students informed about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Keila Rodriguez, UT Health Rio Grande Valley pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics in the UTRGV School of Medicine, wrote a children’s book titled “When the World is Sick,” that addresses the pandemic and the best precautions to help protect families from the virus.

With COVID-19 cases surging again globally, Dr. Michael Dobbs, UT Health Rio Grande Valley chief medical officer, offers important safety guidelines to follow this Thanksgiving, especially as the COVID-19 situation in the Rio Grande Valley becomes increasingly dangerous.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine students had to work on the front lines in circumstances most residents could never dream of. Dr. Timothy Heath, professor of internal medicine at the UTRGV School of Medicine and program director of internal medicine at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, has committed his time to helping UTRGV SOM residents assist with COVID-19 patients.

One UTRGV student admitted she didn’t really pay much attention to all the news about COVID-19 – until she got sick in July and tested positive. She's made a full recovery and is telling others to take precautions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on businesses, with many struggling and hoping to survive. But help is available through the UTRGV Center for Innovation and Commercialization, thanks to a $300,000 grant from the Economic Development Administration. The UTRGV CIC will be offering and coordinating a student internship program to help businesses that have been affected by COVID-19 and, as a result, have had to reduce their staff. The internships will be in person, virtual or hybrid, based on the company's need.

Dr. Cynthia Cavazos Gonzalez, director of the UT Rio Grande Valley Psychology Clinic, is herself one of the thousands of people in the Rio Grande Valley who wants to comfort family and friends after the death of a loved one, as she recently lost her brother to COVID-19. Dr. Gonzalez provides special insight, advice and new approaches on how to handle grief during the pandemic.

The UT Health Rio Grande Valley Clinical Lab has been awarded a Clinical and Translational Science Award partnership grant for expanded research in COVID-19 testing. The grant is part of a multi-institutional approach designed to address COVID-19 testing disparities among vulnerable populations in Texas and help regional efforts to identify a more precise number of COVID-19 cases.

To continue the financial support for UT Rio Grande Valley students during the COVID-19 pandemic, the university has added a Spring Relief Package for 2021 that includes $500 cash grants or UTRGV tuition relief in the amount of $250 for those who do not qualify for the CARES Act.

Elena Quercioli, assistant professor of economics at UT Rio Grande Valley’s Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship, is developing a scientific model that accounts for virtually every dynamic of human behavior during a pandemic, which she hopes will ultimately inform policies to contain future outbreaks and save lives.

From across the globe ­– Turkey, Sweden, Canada, and the Rio Grande Valley – individuals joined the virtual conversation in the first installment of UT Rio Grande Valley’s new series – The Frontier – that put a spotlight on “E-Learning in the Age of COVID-19.” Led by two experts in the field of online learning – Robert G. Doyle, U.S. representative of the International Council for Educational Media, and Badrul H. Khan, author and educator focused on web-based training and educational technology – the live Facebook event discussed how the education world has changed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To help address the emotional, as well as the physical toll frontline medical workers are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the UT Rio Grande Valley School of Rehabilitation Services and Counseling is offering free counseling services. The initiative, called “The Wellness Project,” focuses primarily on individuals in healthcare who have been affected by the pandemic. Counseling will be individually focused and participants can address any topic in the sessions, including issues related to stress, grief, death and dying.

Given complications that could arise from confusing COVID-19 with the flu, UT Health Rio Grande Valley medical professionals are strenuously encouraging the public to get vaccinated for the flu and have provided resources and recommendations for obtaining flu shots. They note that widespread vaccinations against flu can reduce unnecessary COVID-19 testing, as well as protect people who are more vulnerable.

As UT Health RGV rolled out its COVID-19 testing sites, UT Rio Grande Valley School of Nursing professors volunteered at the UT Health RGV COVID-19 Patient Call Center in Harlingen to respond to the needs of a population hit hard by the pandemic.

Five former U.S. Surgeons General will discuss the problem of racial inequity in health care in the United States during COVID-19, at an online roundtable discussion where the UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine is a presenting partner.

UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine has collaborated with Stanford Medicine and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to release a video adaptation of the children’s book, “My Hero is You.”  The purpose of the video and book is to help educate children around the world about COVID-19.

UT Health RGV, the clinical arm of the UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, has launched COVID-19 antibody testing as a third component of their pandemic initiatives, along with drive-thru testing and contact tracing operations. Rio Grande Valley residents now can get tested for COVID-19 antibodies after they have tested positive for coronavirus.

Dr. Sudershan Pasupuleti, the UT Rio Grande Valley School of Social Work’s MSSW accelerated online program director, helped develop remote training through community networks to provide students the field placements necessary to graduate while in-person meetings are off-limits during the pandemic.

As mass public testing sites have moved out of the Valley, UT Rio Grande Valley will be expanding their resources and test capacity to accommodate the increased need due the recent spike of COVID-19 cases in the community.

The UT Rio Grande Valley Office of Professional Education & Workforce Development and the UTRGV Baptist Student Ministries partnered to offer “pay what you can” bags of fresh produce at both the Brownsville and Edinburg campuses as a way to eliminate hunger and enhance access to healthy food.

The UTRGV Career Center is providing the Class of 2020 with new job search tools to help them overcome the challenges due to COVID-19. Students can take advantage of virtual walk-in office hours via Zoom and recent graduates can access job listings on Handshake, an online career management system, and schedule virtual appointments with Career Center staff to get help with resumes and job interview preparation. The Career Center also offers live chats on Instagram, job tips on its Facebook page, and a podcast.

Dr. John H. Krouse, dean of the UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine and executive vice president for health affairs, calls upon the community to face the facts around the current surge in coronavirus infections and provides recommendations to be responsible and celebrate safely this 4^th of July holiday weekend.

Dr. Elena Quercioli, assistant professor of economics and finance in UT Rio Grande Valley’s Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship, is working with an international team of researchers to study the role human behaviors play in spreading contagion.

With the surge in COVID-19 cases in the Rio Grande Valley, the demand on UT Rio Grande Valley’s Patient Call Center and testing sites has tripled since last week. UTRGV clinical providers and staff are mobilizing to meet an increasing demand and working to continue to increase testing capacity further over the next couple of weeks across all their drive-thru locations.

The UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, through its practice plan, UT Health RGV, is substantially increasing the number of COVID-19 tests it can process in-house, via an automated extraction machine called the Thermo Fisher Kingfisher Flex. The automation will allow the lab to process up to 1,000 tests each day, rather than the 150 possible with manual testing.

As classes remain online through the summer semesters, the UTRGV community is studying and working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recognizing that some students may not have Wi-Fi available at home, UTRGV is providing fast, free Wi-Fi service throughout its campuses, including from the parking lots, so they can maintain safe distances from others.

The UTRGV School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health & Biostatistics is leading “Covid Minds at Work,” an inter-departmental work group focused on providing innovative, scientific solutions that directly impact the health of the Rio Grande Valley community and contribute to the regional response during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the group was able to connect health clinics serving underserved areas of the community with gowns, masks, and face shields made by the UTRGV Theatre Department. 

The UT Rio Grande Valley Psychology Clinic will provide a new, confidential phone service called a “warmline” to help community members find support during the COVID-19 pandemic. The warmline will be a free and brief counseling telephone service for individuals experiencing emotional and mental distress related to the pandemic. It also will provide early intervention with support that can help prevent a crisis.

The UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine has opened a fourth COVID-19 testing location, this one at UTRGV’s Harlingen campus. Previously opened UTRGV sites in Brownsville, Mercedes and Edinburg have performed more than 1,700 COVID-19 tests. 

A group chat about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a donation of more than $1,000 to the UTRGV Student Food Pantry and 1,000 face masks to two Rio Grande Valley police departments. The people participating in the chat, including members of the Chinese Student & Scholar Association at UTRGV, raised the funds in just a few days.

The UTRGV Entrepreneurship and Commercialization Center (ECC) is creating networking opportunities and other initiatives to help businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The ECC is providing outreach and technical support to the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation and its StartUp Texas program is helping businesses access federal funding through the Small Business Administration and its partner lenders.

Alumni of UT Rio Grande Valley’s Department of Health and Biomedical Sciences (BMED) Scholars program now at UTHealth’s McGovern Medical School held their first online meeting with 45 current UTRGV BMED students to provide guidance and serve as mentors. They offered important information for the BMED students pursuing careers in the medical and health fields during the pandemic. 

UT Rio Grande Valley Athletics has donated more than $4,000 worth of food originally set to be sold at the baseball concession stand – including 1,320 hotdogs – to the UTRGV Student Food Pantry to help students who might be struggling with food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social distancing orders are not stopping the UTRGV School of Music from carrying on its tradition. Although many of their concerts have been canceled, Dr. Dahlia Guerra, assistant vice president for public art at UTRGV, said they are taking their Patron of the Arts series online for the first time. “These are moments that would give us some comfort,” said Guerra. “When you’re listening to the music, you escape, you’re not only entertained, you’re comforted in a way that only music can do.” 

Citing the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 crisis, Ying Huang, a demography professor in UT San Antonio’s College for Health, Community and Policy, in collaboration with Professor Colleen Heflin from Syracuse University and UTSA graduate researcher Asiya Validova, examined the associations between material hardship and health outcomes in early adulthood and the extent to which these associations are mediated by perceived stress. The study found the adjusted odds of fair or poor health status, depression, sleep problems and suicidal thoughts were higher among individuals with material hardship compared to their counterparts. A considerable proportion of the association between material hardship and health outcomes is attributable to perceived stress. 

In February 2021, UT San Antonio received 400 Moderna COVID-19 vaccine doses for eligible faculty and staff, which was administered at on-campus vaccination clinics. As part of the university's ongoing partnership with UT Health San Antonio, all eligible faculty and staff who are interested in obtaining a vaccine have an opportunity to schedule an appointment. As eligibility expanded to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, all Roadrunners who are interested can take advantage of vaccine appointment opportunities.

A UT San Antonio research team is finding plenty of evidence that the spread of the novel coronavirus can be tracked using the sewer systems. Vikram Kapoor, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is nearing the end of an eight-month study testing wastewater for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Kapoor’s team has received nearly $160,000 in CARES Act funding through the Health Collaborative and San Antonio Metro Health to work on the project. Their research is proving to be successful as samples collected between June and August showed that COVID-19 levels found in wastewater matched the trend of COVID-19 infections that Metro Health reported. The final results of a pilot program led by UTSA to test wastewater for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, confirms the program proved to be effective in helping local health officials track spread of the disease in the community. The results from the coronavirus wastewater tests over the winter holiday are complete, and UT San Antonio researchers say they discovered traces of the virus several days before a spike was reported in the community.

Pianist Tracy Cowden, chair of UT San Antonio’s music department, serves on the Hearts Need Art board and helped develop the Gratitude Gram program. The program was created to address reports of increasing levels of burnout for medical professionals attributed to the pandemic.

Kellie Lynch, a UT San Antonio criminology and criminal justice professor, and Professor TK Logan from the University of Kentucky worked with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence on a national survey to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the dynamics of gender-based violence and the experiences of those serving victims of gender-based violence. The survey findings indicated that most respondents believed intimate partner violence, child abuse and sexual assault have increased during the pandemic. The study also found that survivors face immense barriers to seeking help during the pandemic, such as concerns for their health and safety, being closely monitored at home by an abuser, and a lack of knowledge of how agencies are providing services during these times.

A survey by a UT San Antonio student-professor team revealed interesting insights into why people used bike sharing programs during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Greg Griffin, assistant professor in urban and regional planning, led the study design, and graduate student Jeffrey Jobe led writing the newly-published study, which reviewed bike share programs in San Antonio and 10 other programs across the country. They found that communication, or lack thereof, on procedures bike share organizations were implementing to disinfect bikes and keep riders safe could be key to whether people would use the bikes during the pandemic.

UT San Antonio’s Institute for Economic Development (IED) generated an overall direct economic impact in 2020 of $2.4 billion for the Texas economy. The advisors at the IED’s Small Business Development Center not only continued with their business consulting, training and research during the pandemic; they also quickly pivoted to help bring relief to small businesses, including financial assistance via the Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans assistance.

UT San Antonio has received a grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to provide emergency educational aid for undergraduate students affected by COVID-19. The new funding will allow these students to continue their higher education and get back on track toward graduation.

Francis Yoshimoto, assistant professor of chemistry at UT San Antonio, utilized his training in the scientific community to accelerate knowledge of SARS-CoV-2, helping advance the development of vaccines, therapeutic treatments and research related to combating the virus. Yoshimoto’s COVID-related research earned him two citations by the World Health Organization, one of the highest levels of recognition a research scientist can receive.

UT San Antonio sociology professors have begun a research project spanning five departments, one research center, and new and tenured faculty. Together, the researchers pooled more than $100,000 to fund a national survey on health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic called the Crime, Health, and Politics Survey (CHAPS).

Eric Shattuck, assistant professor of research at the UT San Antonio Institute for Health Disparities Research, is studying the phenomenon of social distancing in response to infectious disease and its effects on pathogen transmission and the health of individuals and communities. Many animals, including humans, exhibit behavioral changes during the early stages of an infection, including reduced social contacts, called sickness behavior. His recent study findings suggest innate social distancing might help prevent the infection from spreading within social groups.

UT San Antonio scientists have discovered it might be possible for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to enter the human brain. The research was led by Jenny Hsieh, professor of biology, director of the UTSA Brain Health Consortium and the Semmes Foundation Chair in Cell Biology, in collaboration with Ricardo Carrion’s lab at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute.

When the first confirmed case of the variant B.1.1.7 strand of COVID-19 in Texas was announced in January 2021, Richard Jones, a UT San Antonio professor specializing in human geography, was not surprised. He had already predicted that a new variant would enter from Harris County. Jones uses a spatial diffusion social gravity model (the population of each county divided by the road distance to the metro area to which it is tributary) and local proxies for the county’s connectivity to the outside world to predict the date of spread. The model explained more than two-thirds of the variation in time-sequencing of the virus as it progressed across the state over five months.

As therapies and support programs for children with autism are canceled or suspended, Leslie Neely, assistant professor of educational psychology at UT San Antonio and coordinator of the applied behavior analysis program, is spearheading a new project that will enable the much-needed services to continue in a virtual setting. Using videoconferencing software, she and her colleagues are teaching behavior therapists how to conduct sessions virtually.

Dr. Brenda Jones, professor in the Department of Counseling at UT San Antonio, explains the toll the pandemic has taken on children's mental wellbeing and how important it is to acknowledge their worries and remind them they are safe.

Dr. Thomas Patterson, a doctor with UT Health San Antonio and University Hospital, says a combination of remdesivir and an anti-inflammatory drug called baricitinib helped COVID-19 patients recover faster.

A study spearheaded by Kiran Bhaganagar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at UT San Antonio, found that outdoor areas may not be as safe as first thought to protect against the coronavirus. According to Bhaganagar, this is the first study to measure spread of coronavirus in outdoor conditions. 

A new study by the UT San Antonio Urban Education Institute found that food insecure students in San Antonio struggled with distance learning and academic engagement more than their peers. The findings linking food insecurity and learning signify how hunger and larger issues of family instability during the ongoing pandemic threaten student growth. Researchers have produced three reports summarizing their findings on how this pandemic has impacted student engagement, the ability to teach and even the socioeconomics -- food, hunger, employment for parents and their families during this trying time.

The UT San Antonio Institute for Economic Development launched the Small Business Development Center COVID-19 Business Recovery Accelerator (SBDC COBRA) to help small businesses weather the financial hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic. COBRA is the only recovery accelerator of its kind in Texas to help stabilize and rebuild the small-business economy. Unique decisions regarding how and when to reopen, evaluating supply chains, workplace safety, financial recovery strategies, training and cybersecurity are just some of the areas the team of professional SBDC advisers are equipped to address.

Fueling transformative research through collaboration, the San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics (SAPPT) has announced the funding of three more collaborative COVID-19 research efforts in San Antonio that are led by researchers from UT Health San Antonio and UT San Antonio. SAPPT awarded more than $600,000 to fund these projects, in addition to funding a SARS CoV-2 vaccine project that was announced in April. SAPPT was created by four leading San Antonio research organizations: UT San Antonio, UT Health San Antonio, Southwest Research Institute and Texas Biomedical Research Institute.

UT San Antonio’s Doug E. Frantz, the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, has received an award from the San Antonio Medical Foundation to support his collaborative work with UT Health San Antonio and SwRI on a novel approach for COVID-19 drug discovery. The grant will help fund collaborative studies that combine virology, high-throughput screening, medicinal chemistry and in-silico drug design expertise.

Dr. Juan Gutierrez, chair of the math department at UT San Antonio, tracks daily coronavirus cases and predicts how certain events — mask mandates, emergency orders, holidays — will affect transmission regionally and nationally. Gutiérrez says if people don’t wear masks and stay home over the holidays, there could be between half a million and 1.2 million deaths by the end of March.

Monica Lawson, an assistant professor of psychology; Megan Piel, an assistant professor of social work; and Michaela Simon, psychology graduate student in the College for Health, Community and Policy, have published research findings that demonstrate parental job loss due to the pandemic can have negative consequences on young children, including increased risk for psychological and physical abuse at the hands of their parents. The researchers also found that focusing on parental mental health and fostering healthy coping strategies among families is important during times of economic crises and may help to reduce family violence.

When all university classes went remote in March because of the growing pandemic, students with disabilities at UT San Antonio as well as their faculty faced a serious dilemma. Through determination and collaboration with Academic Innovation, the university’s Student Disability Services team ensured all online courses were accessible and inclusive, upholding the institution’s mission, vision and core values.

Doug E. Frantz, the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at UT San Antonio, has received an award from the San Antonio Medical Foundation to support his collaborative work with UT Health San Antonio and SwRI on a novel approach for a COVID-19 drug discovery. Frantz is leading a group of researchers involving UTSA, UT Health San Antonio and the Southwest Research Institute to develop antiviral drugs that block SARS-CoV-2 from entering human cells to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on patients infected with the novel coronavirus.

Shannon Marlow, an assistant professor for the Department of Management in UT San Antonio’s College of Business, discusses the virtual shift’s impact on how teams work together, who’s falling behind in an increasingly teleworking world, the benefits of a hybrid approach after COVID-19, and her current research on team psychology.

Nazgol Bagheri, an associate professor of geography at UT San Antonio, has conducted a regional study of over 40 women of color to better understand the pandemic’s impact on the future employment, mothering and other quality-of-life-issues of this population.

UT San Antonio’s Counseling and Mental Health Services and student advocates are providing a vast array of support services to help students maintain a healthy wellbeing during the pandemic. In its commitment to the wellbeing of the campus community, UTSA has initiated several new programs designed to support students’ overall wellness while managing virtual learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping lifestyles, schooling and research—and students from the UT San Antonio’s Honors College will have a chance to dive into the rich yet complex data on the virus that has been mounting for Bexar County and other places. Kara Joyner, department chair and professor in the Department of Demography, has developed a course for undergraduate students that will use the pandemic as a laboratory for research.

While many San Antonians were furloughed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, UT San Antonio says its Career-in-Focus program to help residents find work has helped more than 2,000 people find jobs. The program provides free and deeply discounted career advancement assistance leading to skills-based digital badges or professional certificates.

A new program at UT San Antonio this fall semester is allowing students to be part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The course on contact tracing gives students hands-on experience on how to track people who were exposed to COVID-19.

UT San Antonio announced it is launching a new free online tutoring service, called TutorMe, that will be available to undergraduate students 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With the shift to online learning, UTSA wanted to provide an extra layer of accessible, relevant and effective virtual academic support to ensure students are successful in the new learning environment.

The Department of Music at UT San Antonio offers a great lesson in flexibility. The Spirit of San Antonio marching band, UTSA orchestra, lyric theatre and music are adapting to extraordinary virtual and in-person hybrids for rehearsals, performances and curriculum. The changes will enable students to perform and learn together and virtually, fostering a sense of community while maintaining UTSA safety protocols.

A new national study, funded by the National Science Foundation, is identifying how the COVID-19 pandemic affected student learning and faculty work in STEM fields. “The Challenges and Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” a collaborative study between UT San Antonio, University of Kansas and Claremont Graduate University, surveyed about 1,087 STEM faculty and 4,603 STEM students from around the U.S in June about the effects COVID-19 has had on their mentorships, research, academic careers and mental health.

Five teams made up of 22 graduate students working across research disciplines at UT San Antonio have taken top honors in the first COVID-19 Transdisciplinary Team Grand Challenge. The transdisciplinary nature of this challenge brought UTSA master’s and doctoral students from different fields together to work with community partners to tackle issues brought to light by the current pandemic and to develop proposals for creative, innovative concept projects that address the concerns facing society today.

Mike Villarreal, director of the Urban Education Institute at UT San Antonio, and his team have spent the summer surveying almost 2,000 K–12 public school students, parents and teachers across seven Bexar County school districts and one local network of career-themed schools to find out what worked and what didn’t during pandemic distance learning. The findings in the report, “Teaching and Learning in the Time of COVID-19,” are helping inform current local planning identify what makes online education engaging and effective to  improve distance learning for the fall in participating schools.

UT San Antonio launched a phone campaign called Operation Buddy Check. In an effort to foster connection during the pandemic, student workers and other staff plan to reach out to all 1,600 student-veterans enrolled at the university.

In one of the first studies of bias conducted on biomedical content on Twitter, UT San Antonio researchers found that machine-learning algorithms used to train and classify tweets have an inherent bias because they do not account for how minority groups potentially communicate health information. If machine bias is left unchecked, it can aggravate health disparities instead of improving them, according to Anthony Rios, assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security in UTSA’s College of Business.

In response to the pandemic, UT San Antonio is collaborating with other academic institutions across San Antonio to create an opportunity for students and alumni to network from home via the Greater San Antonio Virtual Career Expo. Students at partnering institutions will have the opportunity to virtually connect with employers from across the nation.

UT San Antonio’s Institute for Economic Development launched its COVID-19 Business Recovery Accelerator to help local businesses access emergency funds and help reboot small businesses impacted by the pandemic. COBRA is the only recovery accelerator of its kind in Texas designed to help stabilize and rebuild the small business economy. 

UT San Antonio is at the forefront of a COVID-19 exposure notification system that uses technology to track where COVID-19 outbreaks are occurring. Wearable devices help trace the virus in a large population through sensors that would indicate whether a person has been exposed to the virus and how the body changes in response.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, UT San Antonio is now offering orientation online for the safety of its new students. Online orientation will provide incoming students with a preview of their first year at UTSA, offering a unique virtual activity that features engaging modules and videos that will kick-start a student’s academic journey.

Researchers from UT San Antonio and the University of Kansas have launched a study to investigate the life and academic challenges that STEM faculty and students around the U.S. are facing—particularly in their mentor-mentee relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. A $153,899 Rapid Response Research grant from the National Science Foundation, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, will help fund their research.

Amita Shah, M.D., assistant professor and associate program director for the Division of Plastic Surgery, created a patient task management and triage software program with a group of UTSA computer science software engineering students to aid with the complicated task of rescheduling appointments and elective surgeries cancelled by the pandemic. 

The San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics has awarded $200,000 for a collaborative study to develop a novel vaccine to combat COVID-19. Researchers believe a vaccine originally developed to combat tularemia, the rare and deadly “rabbit fever,” could also work against the coronavirus. UT San Antonio microbiologist Dr. Karl Klose is leading a consortium of scientists from UT San Antonio, UT Health San Antonio, Southwest Research Institute and Texas Biomedical Research Institute are working together on this effort.

Rogelio Saenz, a professor of demography at UT San Antonio, analyzed data from states and the District of Columbia that reported COVID-19 infection cases or deaths for Latinos. States reporting racial data indicate overwhelmingly high rates of infection within the Latino population but fewer deaths from the virus. 

UT San Antonio engineers used 3-D printing to develop a new breathing tube used in ventilators that solves the problem of instability and tissue damage from the long-term ventilation of coronavirus patients.

UT San Antonio has launched Career in Focus, a workforce initiative in direct support of San Antonio citizens facing widespread job instability due to the pandemic. Core to the initiative is UTSA’s Job Jumpstart program a series of free and discounted online career advancement courses intended to help San Antonians, particularly those recently furloughed and unemployed, sharpen their skills and explore potential new careers. 

UT San Antonio is sending $10 million in refunds to students to help with financial concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. By the end of the week, UTSA will have delivered more than $7.4 million in refunds for housing, meal plans and parking.

Dr. Juan Gutierrez, chairman of UT San Antonio’s math department, produced a model of the local epidemic that found the average number of new infections thought to arise from a single case was higher than generally believed. As health officials realize that symptom-free carriers of the virus are more abundant than previously thought, Gutierrez says his analysis has been justified. 

The social distancing and self-isolation measures that have slowed the spread of COVID-19 may worsen PTSD symptoms and increase the risk for suicide among veterans. Sandra Morissette, a clinical psychologist, professor and interim chair of the Department of Psychology at UT San Antonio, recently received funding from the Veterans Administration to research the impact of social networks on suicide, which could in turn inform how suicide prevention is approached. 

Five of UT San Antonio’s brightest researchers who have been identified as expert resources for understanding and combating COVID-19 answered public questions via livestream chat during a panel discussion called, “Beating COVID-19: How Close Are We?”

UT San Antonio social work adjunct professor and alumna Kimberly Goodwin wants to make sure no one in San Antonio goes hungry during the COVID-19 pandemic. She’s helped to feed over 500 people across the city by providing meals to the needy and lending a helping hand to local community restaurants that have been affected during these unprecedented times.

The Graduate School at UTSA, in partnership with the Office of the Vice President for Research, Economic Development, and Knowledge Enterprise, will launch the COVID-19 Transdisciplinary Team Grand Challenge in May. The challenge is designed to unite UTSA graduate students from a wide range of academic programs to work with community partners while problem-solving the many issues created by the pandemic.

As the battle against COVID-19 wages on, students and scientists at UT Health San Antonio and UT San Antonio are standing on the front-lines making hand sanitizer for local health providers.

A team of UTSA researchers is teaming up with San Antonio College in a new study investigating the attitudes and behaviors of college students amid the coronavirus pandemic. The study will provide a better understanding of how students protect themselves and how the public health response can be improved during infectious respiratory disease outbreaks. 

Long-term compliance to rules like use of mandatory face coverings require new engagement methods. Researchers at UTSA have conducted an experiment that shows how virtual reality videos, when coupled with well-known figures, especially celebrities, can influence positive health behaviors. 

Four UTSA experts convened for a virtual panel discussion to describe the broad economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic at the local, state and national levels. 

Amina Qutub, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at UT San Antonio, along with a group of faculty, staff and students, developed a website to help people find food and personal protective equipment when the coronavirus pandemic shut down businesses and schools. 

Mary McNaughton-Cassill, Ph.D., a professor of clinical psychology at UT San Antonio, offers tips for managing stress associated with the coronavirus pandemic. 

UT Tyler is using a $100,000 Reskilling Texas Workers Grant to help displaced workers and students continue their education and aid in their economic recovery from COVID-19. The funds target Texas residents who have not attended a college or university for at least six months, have enough credits to be classified as a senior and are interested in completing their education with a Bachelor of Applied Arts (BAAS) degree or the RN to BSN degree.

UT Health Science Center at Tyler researcher Dr. Sreerama Shetty recently received a $300,000 grant from the Department of Defense to continue researching an intervention therapy to treat a COVID-19-related lung disease. 

Pharmacy students at UT Tyler are volunteering in various ways to help support the community, including vaccinating patients and assisting pharmacies that are in dire need of help with day-to-day operations.

Workforce Solutions East Texas is working with UT Tyler to provide up-to-date COVID-related information for businesses and individuals interested in working in the environmental safety industry. Hosted by the UT Tyler Longview University Center, the virtual training, COVID: Safety & Sanitation for Business, teaches participants how to maintain a healthy and safe environment for employees and patrons.

For three years, the Intune Mobile Clinic, a collaboration between UT Tyler and Special Health Resources, has been traveling to rural areas, mainly in East Texas. However, the mission has become more challenging during COVID and the recent surge in the region.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration announced Monday that it will be awarding a $300,000 CARES Act Recovery Assistance grant to UT Tyler to boost their capacity to support regional economic development strategies in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

UT Tyler‘s Center for Opinion Research conducted a survey of mental health in Texas to determine perceptions about the threat of the coronavirus. Respondents indicated they understand the threat to society and so are more likely to follow public health recommendations to prevent the spread of COVID-19. 

As the retail market has declined during the coronavirus pandemic, economic recovery could depend greatly on consumers shopping at local small businesses, according to a UT Tyler marketing professor.

Dr. Kathleen Bell, a professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said her hospital’s long-term COVID-19 clinic started last April as a wave of infections hit Italy and New York early in the pandemic. COVID RECOVER is UT Southwestern’s designated COVID-19 rehabilitation outpatient clinic that is run through the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, providing both in-person and virtual individualized support for those recovering from the long-term health effects of COVID-19. Of the more than 28 million Americans diagnosed with COVID-19, an estimated 10 to 30 percent fall into the category commonly known as "long-haulers." Most long-haul patients seeking treatment at UT Southwestern Medical Center benefit from physical therapy to help with breathing, as well as emotional support and counseling.

Doctors at UT Southwestern Medical Center are co-leading a national, federally funded study to examine the frequency of allergic reactions to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines among those with a history of severe allergies.

UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists have identified the first cases of the Brazilian variant of COVID-19 infection in North Texas using next-generation sequencing technologies along with PCR testing. Data from UT Southwestern shows the UK variant was found in about 55% of sampled individuals.

The Dallas Mavericks are partnering with UT Southwestern to raise vaccine awareness and lower vaccine hesitancy and uncertainty with the new "Take the Shot" education program.

Madhukar Trivedi, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center, explains why some COVID-19 patients are diagnosed with a neurological or mental health condition within six months of infection.

UT Southwestern Medical Center has opened a new community COVID-19 vaccination site on the UT Dallas campus. The site will provide vaccinations for both UTSW patients and community members, including UTD Comets, who meet current eligibility criteria set by the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Vaccinating health care workers resulted in an immediate and notable reduction of positive COVID-19 cases among employees, reducing the number of required isolations and quarantines by more than 90 percent, according to data at UT Southwestern Medical Center published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

According to a new study from UT Southwestern, individuals under age 50 are more likely to be hospitalized, need a ventilator, and die from COVID-19 if they're severely obese. While all adults who are overweight or obese are at greater risk for serious complications from the disease, the link is strongest for those age 50 and under. “If the population is more obese and obesity clearly contributes to worse outcomes, then neighborhoods, cities, states and countries that are more obese will have a greater toll from COVID,” said Dr. James de Lemos, a professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center who led a study of hospitalized COVID patients.

Pregnant women are at increased risk of preterm birth or pregnancy loss if they develop a severe case of COVID-19. An article by two UT Southwestern obstetricians provides guidance on whether they should receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

A new study by Beatriz Fontoura, Ph.D., professor of cell biology at UT Southwestern, identifies how a coronavirus protein called Nsp1 blocks the activity of genes that promote viral replication -- providing hope for new COVID-19 treatments by studying how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells and propagates itself while avoiding the body’s natural immune system.

World health experts have long suspected that the incidence of COVID-19 has been higher than reported. Now, a machine-learning algorithm developed at UT Southwestern estimates that the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. since the pandemic began is nearly three times that of confirmed cases.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a detrimental impact on substance use, mental health, and weight-related health behaviors among people with obesity, according to a new study by researchers at UT Southwestern and the UTHealth School of Public Health.

A recent study from UT Southwestern’s Department of Pediatrics shows simulation can be a viable way to quickly evaluate and refine new medical guidelines and educate hospital staff in new procedures. The findings, originally shaped around new COVID-19-related pediatric resuscitation procedures at UTSW and Children’s Health, could eventually be used to help implement other types of guidelines at medical centers nationwide.

UT Southwestern Medical Center anticipated an initial shipment of 5,850 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and more than 6,000 front-line health care workers at UT Southwestern have received initial doses of the COVID-19 vaccine after the first shipment was delivered to the Medical Center.

Dr. James Cutrell, infectious disease specialist at UT Southwestern Medical Center, provides an overview of the two COVID-19 vaccines.

A team led by UT Southwestern researchers has identified a key gene necessary for cells to consume and destroy viruses. The findings could lead to ways to manipulate this process to improve the immune system’s ability to combat viral infections, such as those fueling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Pregnant women who test positive for COVID-19 and their newborn babies have a low risk of developing severe symptoms, according to a new study from UT Southwestern. The study shows that 95 percent of women who tested positive for COVID-19 during pregnancy had no adverse outcomes. Additionally, the study found that the virus was transmitted to the fetus in just three percent of the cases. 

Research presented by UT Southwestern cardiologists at the annual American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2020 showed that Black and Hispanic people were more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white patients, and that nonwhite men with cardiovascular disease or risk factors were more likely to die.

A major UT Southwestern study aimed at tracking the spread of COVID-19 is now expanding its reach, tapping trusted allies in the community to both survey and serve those most at risk. Initially launched as an invitation-only study, volunteers from anywhere in Dallas or Tarrant counties are now being encouraged to go online and enroll.

The number of people being hospitalized for COVID-19 is just one data point that researchers at UT Southwestern use to create a tool that’s quickly become a go-to for decision makers and the public alike.

UT Southwestern Associate Professor Jasmin Tiro is leading a study on the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on communities of color to determine why COVID-19 hits certain communities harder than others.

About 5% of Dallas-Fort Worth residents have been exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to early results from an ongoing study by researchers at UT Southwestern and Texas Health Resources. That puts Dallas below an estimated national average of 9% and far below the 60% to 70% threshold that many experts believe is needed to reach herd immunity — the point at which enough people become resistant to the virus that it starts to fade.

As more DFW businesses and schools have reopened, and as cases have begun to surge again, UT Southwestern and Texas Health Resources researchers are expanding participation in the DFW COVID-19 Prevalence Study, which is uniquely designed to reveal how widely COVID-19 has spread and why some communities are harder hit.

Projections by UT Southwestern, which have been accurate throughout the year, are predicting a terrifying winter. The latest models show that without a change in the effectiveness of disease abatement efforts, there could be 2,500 new cases each day by January.

A new analysis from UT Southwestern Medical Center shows COVID-19 cases are on the rise in both Dallas County and Collin County and people in the 30 to 50 age bracket are most impacted.

Dr. Renee Enriquez, assistant professor for the physical medicine and rehabilitation department at UT Southwestern Medical Center, sees patients with tech neck and offers tips to avoid the ailment or lessen the pain.

Following guidance from federal agencies, UT Southwestern’s Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center led efforts to adapt clinical trial operations due to the pandemic. To protect patient safety, changes such as utilizing remote consents, conducting telehealth study visits, and shipping oral study treatment to patients’ homes have streamlined the cancer clinical trial participation process. A survey of UTSW clinical cancer research professionals found that most clinical trial coordinators, managers, and nurses report positive experiences with these COVID-related adjustments. In fact, a majority are in favor of keeping the new protocols even after the pandemic ends.

A UT Southwestern researcher who studies how the body’s innate immune system responds to coronaviruses is one of 10 recipients of the coveted NIH Director’s Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health. John Schoggins, Ph.D., will receive $3.5 million over the next five years to examine whether animals that carry viruses such as Ebola and SARS-CoV-2 possess antiviral genes that allow them to survive. The hope is that this information could help researchers develop treatments for humans who contract diseases like COVID-19.

Administering neuropsychology evaluations to children online in the comfort of their own homes is feasible and delivers results comparable to tests traditionally performed in a clinic, found a new study led by UT Southwestern researchers and Children’s Health. The recently published finding could help expand access to specialists and reduce barriers to care, particularly as the popularity of telemedicine grows during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Doctors from UT Southwestern Medical Center talked about the state of the pandemic, new treatments and children’s health in a recent call with Dallas News readers.

Conditions related to obesity, including inflammation and leaky gut, leave the lungs of obese patients more susceptible to COVID-19 and may explain why they are more likely to die from the disease, UT Southwestern scientists published in a new article. They found that inflammation in the lungs combined with high viral loads of the novel coronavirus create a perfect storm for obese patients with COVID-19. They suggest that drugs used to lower inflammation in the lungs could prove beneficial to obese patients with the disease.

Expanded telehealth services at UT Southwestern have proved effective at safely delivering patient care during the pandemic, leading to an increase in patients even in specialties such as plastic surgery, according to a new study. The study, published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, illuminates the unexpected benefits that telehealth has had during the pandemic and provides insight into what this may mean for the future of medicine in the United States.

A pregnant mother who tested positive for COVID-19 transmitted the virus causing the disease to her prematurely born baby, UT Southwestern physicians report. Both were treated and recovered. The case, detailed in an article published in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, adds to a growing body of evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can be transmitted in utero. It also underscores the importance of limiting COVID-19 exposure for pregnant women.

UT Southwestern Medical Center is the first facility in Dallas and the surrounding region to participate in the international COLCORONA trial. Researchers are testing a combination of drugs that may be able to help patients with mild to moderate cases of COVID-19. The goal is to find treatments that can be given to patients before their illness becomes severe and they require hospitalizations.

Experts from UT Southwestern Medical Center and Children's Health put together a guide to help parents look at the risks and decide what's best for their families before determining whether their child should go back to the classroom or learn virtually. The guide also helps parents who have children with underlying health conditions determine low, moderate or high-risk when it comes to COVID-19.

UT Southwestern Medical Center opened a dedicated outpatient clinic to test a half-dozen treatments for patients with mild to moderate symptoms of COVID-19.

While most of the world shifted to home-based work to avoid COVID-19, virus researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center stayed on-site, amping up their lab and data work to fight and defeat the virus.

To gain a better picture of the unfolding pandemic in Dallas and Tarrant counties, researchers at UT Southwestern and Texas Health Resources will conduct what is expected to be one of the nation’s largest studies on community prevalence of COVID-19 by testing tens of thousands of people who represent a cross-section of the North Texas population.

Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, a professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center and chief of infectious diseases at Children's Health, provides advice for families trying to decide whether their children will be in a classroom or learning at home when the new school year begins. 

Scientists at UT Southwestern have identified a possible treatment for COVID-19 that may soon be tested on patients in the Dallas area. Atovaquone, a drug that is best known for its use treating pneumonia in HIV patients, prevents the virus that causes COVID-19 from replicating in cells.

UT Southwestern's revised COVID-19 model indicates a 20% spike in virus-related hospitalizations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area over the next two weeks.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a significant impact on people with obesity as they struggle to manage their weight and mental health during shelter-in-place orders, according to research led by UTHealth and UT Southwestern. The researchers believe their work can inform clinicians and other health professionals on effective strategies to minimize the physical and psychosocial health impacts from COVID-19 among adults with obesity.

In mid-May, experts at UT Southwestern Medical Center projected that new daily cases could surge more than threefold, to 800 per day, by July in Dallas County. Their latest forecast, updated May 29, shows daily case counts falling to just below 200 by July.

Dr. Mamta Jain, professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, who oversees COVID-19 clinical trials, and Erin Carlson, associate clinical professor and director of graduate public health programs at UT Arlington’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation, discussed coronavirus and what North Texans need to know as the state reopens.

The number of new COVID-19 cases in Dallas-Fort Worth will likely more than double by early July even if current social distancing measures and other prevention steps continue, according to a report by UT Southwestern.

Three drugs that are already approved by the Food and Drug Administration or other international agencies can block the production of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in human cells, according to computational and pharmaceutical studies performed by UT Southwestern scientists.

UT Southwestern is actively responding to the spread of COVID-19, with infectious disease physicians leading efforts to keep patients informed, educated, and safe. UT Southwestern researchers are making publicly available on the institution’s website what they have learned from predictive modeling about the virus and how our behaviors affect its spread. The goal is to help policymakers keep the region ahead of the virus.

Millions of Americans are being impacted by the psychological fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic aftermath, and large numbers may experience emotional distress and be at increased risk of developing psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety. An article co-authored by Carol North, M.D., a UT Southwestern crisis psychiatrist, calls on health care providers to monitor the psychosocial needs of their patients as well as themselves and fellow health care workers during this time.

UT Medical Branch honored its COVID researchers at a surprise event. Researchers were heroic in laying down building blocks in a global effort to find a vaccine for the disease, Dr. Ben Raimer, interim medical branch president said. He compared the pandemic challenge to science fiction, but added the scientists were already prepared for urgent research, many putting their own research on hold to aid in the rapid response. 

Researchers at UT Medical Branch looked at over 10,000 COVID-19 patients and found that significantly more former smokers ended up in the hospital and died from COVID-19 than those who still smoked or had never smoked at all. 

UT Medical Branch researchers collaborated with Pfizer/BioNTech in a study that found that vaccines being administered now are effective against newer strains of the COVID-19 virus. Evidence shows that vaccine antibodies remain highly active against newly emerged California and New York variants of SARS-CoV-2, and that continued mass immunization can end the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at UT Medical Branch, explained the current progress toward reaching herd immunity in the U.S. Based on the number of immunizations that have occurred and conservative estimates on natural immunity, he estimates that about 25 percent of the U.S. population is currently protected against COVID.

Blood taken from people who had been given the vaccine neutralized an engineered version of the virus that contained the same mutations carried on the spike portion of the highly contagious P.1 variant first identified in Brazil, according to the study conducted by scientists from UT Medical Branch and the companies.

Dozens of homebound people in Galveston County received their second doses of COVID-19 vaccinations last week thanks to a group of UT Medical Branch nurses. The nurses, who work in the medical branch’s geriatric house call program, last week hit slushy roads in subfreezing temperatures to get shots in arms. After the storm, UTMB nurses and other health care workers delivered second doses to 90 homebound patients in Galveston County, many of whom were without electricity or safe water, and are volunteering their time to make sure those who can't leave their homes get their dose of the vaccine

A new report conducted by UT Medical Branch and Pfizer suggests that Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine can protect people against new coronavirus variants. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers genetically engineered versions of the virus to carry some of the mutations found in the B.1.351 variant, first seen in South Africa. They tested them against blood samples taken from 15 people who had received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as part of a clinical trial. "The reduction in the levels of neutralization against the South African variant of about 2/3 is fairly small compared to variations in neutralization levels generated by vaccines against other viruses that have even more variability in their protein sequences than SARS-CoV-2," said Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at UT Medical Branch.

A collaborative team from UT Medical Branch and Pfizer has shown that the common mutations of SARS-CoV-2 that have appeared in the United Kingdom and South Africa strains of the virus can be neutralized by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The study, using sera from 20 vaccine recipients, was published in Nature Medicine. Led by Dr. Pei-Yong Shi of UTMB and Dr. Philip Dormitzer of Pfizer, the study found evidence of neutralization of the mutant viruses with slight variation: neutralization against the E484K (South African) mutation was slightly lower than neutralization against the N501Y (U.K.) mutation.

A new study conducted by Pfizer and scientists from UT Medical Branch found that the Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine appeared to only lose a small bit of effectiveness against an engineered virus with three key mutations from the new variant found in South Africa.

UT Medical Branch researchers say BMI plays a big role in how sick a person is likely to get from COVID-19. They are developing a calculator to help determine a person’s risk of serious COVID-19 illness using mainly their BMI and age. 

Researchers at UTHealth and UT Medical Branch have discovered a potential new antibody therapy for COVID-19 -- identifying a combination of two antibodies CoV2-06 and CoV2-14 that may help stop the spread of the virus. “By leveraging the unique antibody drug discovery capabilities at UTHealth and the strong virology expertise at UTMB, we started to generate SARS-CoV-2-neutralizing antibodies in February of last year. The lead antibody combination out of our research is now being developed with a biotech partner for the treatment of COVID-19,” stated Zhiqiang An, PhD, professor and Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, and faculty member at MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

Dr. Megan Berman, a physician and faculty member at the Sealy Institute of Vaccine Sciences at UT Medical Branch, addresses questions about how the virus works and what to expect with the vaccine.

Galveston County officials and UT Medical Branch announced plans Wednesday to collaborate on a mass COVID-19 vaccination hub at Walter Hall Park in League City, which will eventually have the capacity to administer thousands of shots per day. 

Even after much of the general population gets COVID-19 vaccines, they will likely need to get annual doses to protect against future mutations of the virus, according to researchers at UT Medical Branch.

Dozens of facilities have cropped up around the U.S. to address the effects of COVID-19 that can stubbornly afflict some people weeks or months after the infection has subsided. At UT Medical Branch’s post-COVID-19 clinic in Clear Lake, patients range in age from 23 to 90. Half were never hospitalized.

Researchers at UT Medical Branch are trying to figure out if breast milk has any innate ability to stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, or if an infected mother can pass antibodies to her breastfeeding child. Dr. Roberto Garofalo, John Sealy Distinguished Chair in Pediatrics and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics at UTMB, said his new study, which is funded by a three-year grant from the Gerber Foundation, could provide some answers by asking pregnant women to provide samples of breast milk after they give birth.

UT Medical Branch microbiologist Pei-Yong Shi recently published a paper on the variant, which was discovered in the United Kingdom and also appeared in South Africa. He said it’s still unclear if the new variant will interact differently with COVID-19 vaccines, but says no one should panic. Rather, he says it’s an opportunity for researchers like him to learn all they can to get ahead of its spread.

New research from UT Medical Branch suggests that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine can protect against a mutation found in two easier-to-spread variants of the coronavirus that erupted in Britain and South Africa. For this study, Pfizer teamed with UTMB researchers  for laboratory tests to see if the mutation affected its vaccine’s ability to do so.

Farah Kudrath, a preventive medicine physician and psychiatry resident at UT Medical Branch, and Janek Patel, director of infection control and healthcare epidemiology at UTMB, explain how the COVID-19 vaccines approved by the FDA were able to overcome the barriers that usually slow down vaccine development.

Dr. Vineet Menachery, who studies coronaviruses at UT Medical Branch, explains the potential risks associated with new mutations of the coronavirus.

UT Medical Branch received and began administering the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to its “first tier” health care workers—frontline employees who are at elevated risk for occupational exposure to the virus.

A new study by a multidisciplinary team from UT Medical Branch has shown a dominant mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein enhances viral replication in the upper respiratory airway, which may contribute to the increased transmission of COVID-19. This finding is important in understanding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 as well as in the development of vaccines and therapeutic antibodies.

Dr. Lawrence Sowers, professor of pharmacology and medicine at UT Medical Branch, and his team have completed a systematic study of how SARS-CoV-2 causes disease and the biological indicators that could identify vulnerable patients faster, allowing health care providers to intervene quicker and more aggressively.

Researchers from UT Medical Branch have discovered SARS-CoV-2 proteins that suppress the body's immune response, thereby enabling infection and transmission of the disease. The recently published findings are paramount to understanding the biology of COVID-19 and to developing new vaccines against the disease. Pei-Yong Shi, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology who led the study at UTMB, stated that the most practical application for this research is for a vaccine.

Dr. Richard Rupp, the director of clinical trials and clinical research at UT Medical Branch, said 500 to 1,000 people in Galveston County are participating in trials at the medical branch for two vaccines, one being developed by Moderna and another by Pfizer. In the global Pfizer trial launched in late July, UTMB has enrolled more than 500 of the study’s nearly 44,000 participants at its three sites — Galveston, League City and Clear Lake.

Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at UT Medical Branch, describes four possible scenarios for how humans might interact with SARS-2 over time — in other words, what kind of immunity we might expect.

Researchers are hoping to get a COVID-19 vaccine by 2021, and even that would be record time. UT Medical Branch is involved in clinical trials. Dr. Alan Barrett, the director of vaccine sciences at UTMB, says that even though they are doing what they normally do to develop a vaccine, they’re assembling everything together at warp speed to obtain research data.

Scientists at UT Medical Branch have employed an unlikely partner in their quest to develop treatments for COVID-19 disease: the common firefly. UTMB virologists are using the luciferase, the enzyme that causes fireflies to glow at twilight, to develop faster and more accurate diagnostic tests for COVID-19 as well as to analyze potential therapies and gain a clearer understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself.

Scott Weaver, the scientific director of the Galveston National Lab and director of the UT Medical Branch Institute for Human Infections & Immunity, explained a new study that shows how long the virus can stay in the air. Dr. Weaver also provided recommendations on how to stay safe from airborne microparticles that could carry coronavirus.

Implementation of a specialized air filter to “catch and kill” SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, may be one step closer to reality, according to researchers from UT Medical Branch, the University of Houston and Medistar Corporation.

Dr. Ben Raimer, UTMB president ad interim, explains why it is important to wear a mask to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Raimer notes that masks are not a silver bullet against the illness, but they are a useful and effective tool along with other prevention measures, including social distancing, frequent and thorough hand washing, and self-isolation when ill. (6/26/20)

UT Medical Branch and Galveston County will offer free coronavirus antibody testing to county residents beginning Wednesday.

Researchers from UT Medical Branch explored the effects of estrogen and testosterone and their possible therapeutic effects in treating older patients with COVID-19. The findings are now available in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

A team of researchers from UT Medical Branch are active partners in the National Institutes of Health’s newly launched study to learn more about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on pregnancy and post-partum care. The study is conducted within UTMB and the other 11 health care sites across the U.S. that encompass the Maternal Fetal Medicine Units Network. The network accounts for more than 160,000 deliveries each year, and the large and diverse sample allows researchers to generalize their study findings to the U.S. population.

UT Medical Branch’s Galveston National Laboratory was one of three labs to confirm a therapeutics company’s drugs were able to neutralize the pandemic coronavirus. “Our lab tested a panel of antibodies against a real SARS-CoV-2 in biocontainment. We were pleased to see very good neutralizing activity for some antibodies. We are working on their testing in vivo, and I hope to see protection soon,” said Dr. Alex Bukreyev at UTMB’s Galveston National Laboratory. 

UT Medical Branch and Galveston County are teaming up to provide free testing for county residents. Three mass COVID-19 testing sites will open on May 20 in Galveston, League City and Texas City. 

Darrell Carney, CEO of an independent biotech firm and principal developer of a drug that will be tested for clinical application to problems related to COVID-19, credits UT Medical Branch’s partnership with the Galveston Economic Development Partnership’s business incubation program.

As the coronavirus spread, demand for face masks grew. Professor Miguel Grimaldo, biological containment director at UT Medical Branch, and his team tested a system that works to clean N95 masks used in hospitals by steam heating. 

The Moody Foundation is donating almost $2.5 million to UT Medical Branch for neurosurgery and for simulation education and training for physicians and students in fields related to COVID-19. 

The Sealy & Smith Foundation of Galveston has awarded a $3.35 million gift to UT Medical Branch to support research focused on fighting the COVID-19 virus. The gift will enable UTMB’s most noted scientists to work together concurrently to more quickly advance promising vaccines and therapies. 

A multidisciplinary team at UT Medical Branch at Galveston working to combat the COVID-19 virus has a system that will unlock researchers' ability to more quickly develop and evaluate developing vaccines, diagnose infected patients and explore whether or how the virus has evolved. The scientists developed the system by engineering a reverse genetic system, which allows researchers to make the virus in the lab and manipulate it in a petri dish.

As Texas prepares to lift some stay-at-home restrictions, health and municipal authorities have moved to the more ambitious job of surveillance testing of the general population. Galveston residents are being tested at a rate three times the national average. UT Medical Branch is providing all testing materials and processing for Galveston County. 

Dr. Lokesh Shahani, a psychiatrist and chief medical officer at UTHealth Harris County Psychiatric Center, says she has seen an upward trend of mental health conditions and suicidal tendencies in children during the pandemic. Dr. Shahni explains how providing an atmosphere of being reassured and trusting is something that kids appreciate and tend to open up about their feelings.

Intermountain Healthcare, UTHealth and Rush University Medical Center have joined a study backed by the National Institutes of Health to create an AI-based COVID-19 digital biomarker which aims to identify the earliest signals of an inflammatory response specific to an individual who has COVID-19, and may also provide early detection of a rapid clinical decompensation in high-risk COVID-19 patients.

Dr. James Melville with the UTHealth School of Dentistry has become a specialist in treating people hospitalized with COVID-19 who develop massively enlarged tongues and is researching why macroglossia — a condition where COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals have developed severely swollen tongues — is ocurring. He has performed surgeries to help patients regain use of their tongues so they can eat and talk again. After a Florida man lay on his stomach for 12 hours a day for three weeks – necessary to heal ailing lungs due to COVID-19 – a new alarming complication awaited him and his family. The patient’s tongue was severely swollen – to the point where he was unable to speak or eat. James Melville, DDS, an associate professor and oral surgeon at UTHealth School of Dentistry, was able to perform surgery to repair his massive macroglossia, a rare complication from COVID intubation infection.

COVID brain fog could become a silent crisis within the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Sean Savitz, professor of neurology with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, who sees patients at UTHealth Neurosciences. Dr. Savitz explains the symptoms and what to do if you think you are experiencing brain fog. 

While vaccine side effects, in general, are mild and short-lasting, can their presence tell you anything else about what's going on in your body? Luis Ostrosky-Zeichner, MD, infectious disease specialist at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, explains what it all means.

Diane M. Santa Maria, dean of the Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth, said administering COVID-19 vaccines was an opportunity that offered service-learning beneficial for students’ technical skills practice. Once students and faculty were offered the vaccine to assure personal safety, the faculty utilized the simulation lab to provide additional education about the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus itself, and technical skills to vaccinate members of the community.

Pregnant women who are hospitalized with COVID-19 and viral pneumonia are less likely than non-pregnant women to die from these infections, according to a new study by researchers with UTHealth and the University of Maryland School of Medicine. 

Throughout the past year, everyone has faced challenges that have impacted their personal and professional lives due to COVID-19. While many retreated to their homes to stay safe from the virus, others – like nurses – worked the front lines, provided care to their patients via telecommunication, and carried on with research and teaching their nursing students. To celebrate Nurses Week, three nurses with Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth reflect on the most challenging year of their careers.

Omonele O. Nwokolo, MD, professor of anesthesiology at UTHealth's McGovern Medical School and physician at Memorial Hermann, has been working tirelessly through the pandemic amid personal struggles, including her husband's COVID hospitalization, her daughter's cancer diagnosis, and losing family to coronavirus.

Doctors with UTHealth discuss vaccine side effects and how to talk with a loved one about their vaccination status. 

Over the last year, parents have been doing their part to stay home to help stop the spread of COVID-19, leading many children to miss their annual check-ups and recommended vaccinations. Sandra McKay, associate professor of pediatrics at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, explains the importance of these visits. UTHealth public health experts are hitting the ground to bring lifesaving immunizations directly to children in underserved communities.

In addition to the physical health problems caused by the pandemic, there has been a heavy mental health toll from months of lockdown and upheaval, particularly for children and teens. While the core reason behind the depression or anxiety is the same, UTHealth experts explain the variety of ways it can be expressed and offer techniques children and teens can use to keep their stress and anxiety levels in check. 

A large national clinical trial to evaluate the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for safety and efficacy in pregnant women is now open for enrollment at UTHealth. For the Phase II/III study, researchers across the country are enrolling 4,000 healthy women over the age of 18 who are between 27 and 34 weeks pregnant. The Houston site is in the UTHealth Women’s Research Program – Memorial City, led by investigator Sandra Hurtado, MD, an assistant professor of OB-GYN with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. 

After three months of vaccinating the community, UTHealth Vaccine Hub administered its 100,000 dose on April 9, 2021. The vaccination site run with the help of medical personnel and staff from UT Physicians, the clinical practice of McGovern Medical School, UTHealth, and student nurse volunteers from Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth. 

Researchers are using a novel health platform that links them to shared electronic health records from consented patients to track long-term effects of COVID-19 in a new study by UTHealth. UTHealth is one of eight U.S. sites for the INSPIRE trial (Innovative Support for Patients with SARS COV-2 Infections Registry), and patients will be recruited from Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. The trial is a prospective cohort study, meaning researchers will follow participants over time to observe their outcomes. 

Alcohol use during the pandemic is on the rise, but tools and resources are available for those who might need help finding better ways to manage their emotions. Michael Weaver, MD, professor of psychiatry at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, explains why a person might turn to alcohol as a coping mechanism and provides tips to seek and deal with alcohol dependence during these uncertain times. 

As the world narrowed its focus to the pandemic this past year, the scientific community at McGovern Medical School likewise quickly switched its research attention to discover new therapies and treatment options for COVID-19 patients. The pandemic forged new research opportunities and collaboration between multiple departments and faculty members to expedite and share findings.

Mental health specialists at UTHealth say many people are experiencing "cognitive dulling" as a result of being in "survival mode" for the past year during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cognitive dulling is a form of mental fatigue that leads to difficulty concentrating, decreased productivity, and a decline in emotional and mental health, according to Jennifer Bahrman, PhD, assistant professor in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. 

Michael Chang, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and infectious diseases pediatrician with UT Physicians, explains the importance of the preliminary results from a Pfizer-BioNTech study showing vaccination is safe and effective in adolescents ages 12-15.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says pregnant women are at an increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19, and if infected, they might have an increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as preterm birth. That’s why at 30 weeks pregnant, Jacqueline Parchem, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and maternal-fetal medicine specialist with UT Physicians, chose to get the COVID-19 vaccine participating in a study that found COVID-19 vaccines are extremely effective at protecting pregnant women and likely provide protection for their babies as well. Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, an assistant professor with UTHealth School of Public Health, broke down the science behind the vaccine for pregnant women in a recent article.

Members of the UT Physicians Healthcare Transformation Initiatives (HTI) team have dedicated their nights and weekends to the vaccination effort. The HTI team handled the initial scheduling of the COVID-19 vaccine appointments for students, faculty, and employees at UT Physicians, UTHealth, and the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. Once vaccines were ready and available to the public, it made sense that they would continue the invitation and scheduling effort considering their department’s mission.

Young adults with disabilities often need complex care because of extensive health care conditions that may limit communications, mobility, or require special medical equipment and transportation. When the opportunity was available to offer the COVID-19 vaccine to patients with disabilities on Saturday, Mar. 6, UT Physicians care providers worked together to offer a convenient drive-thru service at the vaccine hub of UTHealth.

As many as a quarter of Texas residents have COVID-19 antibodies, according to a study from UTHealth and Texas Department of Health Services researchers. The study, called Texas CARES, is to date the nation’s largest COVID-19 serological testing assessment. The presence of antibodies indicates a past infection and presumably some degree of immune protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 illness. The study also shows evidence of significant COVID-19 antibodies in children (about 30% of children ages 5 to 19 sampled had COVID-19 antibodies), which may become an important factor in helping Texas and the U.S. reach COVID-19 herd immunity. 

While the Johnson & Johnson single-dose COVID-19 vaccine that has now received emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has a lower efficacy rate compared to other previously approved vaccines, Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, an assistant professor at UTHealth School of Public Health in Dallas, explains why it is still a significant step toward ending the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist with the UTHealth School of Public Health, said many Texans had to break their COVID-safe household bubbles to stay warm with friends or family, which could contribute to another surge in cases. Jetelina explained that this and other aspects of the storm, such as people standing in long lines at grocery stores and to get water, along with increased presence of the B117 variant in the state, could influence transmission.

Keisha Ray, a bioethicist and professor at the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, has become an unofficial ambassador during the pandemic, trying to convince people of color to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

While the vaccine is not ready yet for kids, there is still plenty of information parents need to know right now. Dr. Michael Chang, a pediatric infectious disease specialist with UTHealth and UT Physicians, helps answer questions about the COVID-19 vaccine and kids. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a detrimental impact on substance use, mental health, and weight-related health behaviors among people with obesity, according to a new study by researchers at UT Southwestern and the UTHealth School of Public Health.

A $4 million subcontract grant has been awarded to researchers at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics to develop a data coordinating center for COVID-19 data collected from virus researchers across the country. The subcontract grant is part of a $23 million grant awarded to the University of California San Diego. UC San Diego and UTHealth data scientists and infectious diseases specialists will collaborate to regulate viral samples, COVID-19 testing and procedures, and data to integrate and share timely information. Hua Xu, PhD, professor and director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics, will lead the team responsible for building the data-sharing platform.

Experts have reported mutations of the coronavirus originating in the U.K. and South Africa. Luis Ostrosky, MD, professor of infectious diseases and vice chair of healthcare quality at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, breaks down what the public should know about these and similar variants.

In one of the Houston neighborhoods hit hardest by the coronavirus, state and local public officials, together with leaders from UTHealth and The University of Texas System, gathered at UT Physicians Multispecialty-Jensen on Saturday, Jan. 23, to encourage everyone to roll up their sleeves and receive the COVID-19 vaccine. During the news event, which was livestreamed on Facebook, the community leaders emphasized that the vaccine, paired with the continued wearing of masks, social distancing, and handwashing, is essential to ending the pandemic.

UTHealth, which includes clinical practices UT Physicians and UT Health Services, has been named a COVID-19 vaccine hub in Harris County by the Texas Department of State Health Services. The goal of these hubs is to provide more people the vaccine and a simpler way to sign up for an appointment. (1/22/21)

Phuong Nguyen, MD, assistant professor of surgery at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth was asked to virtually participate in an Inauguration Day event by the presidential inauguration committee in the form of a recorded song with Demi Lovato celebrating health care workers for their heroic work during the COVID-19 pandemic. What sparked this personal invitation? A simple, yet clever music video produced and promoted early in the pandemic by Nguyen and other health care workers across the U.S.

Researchers at UTHealth and UT Medical Branch have discovered a potential new antibody therapy for COVID-19 -- identifying a combination of two antibodies CoV2-06 and CoV2-14 that may help stop the spread of the virus. “By leveraging the unique antibody drug discovery capabilities at UTHealth and the strong virology expertise at UTMB, we started to generate SARS-CoV-2-neutralizing antibodies in February of last year. The lead antibody combination out of our research is now being developed with a biotech partner for the treatment of COVID-19,” stated Zhiqiang An, PhD, professor and Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, and faculty member at MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

George Foreman, the retired two-time heavyweight boxing champion, is teaming up with UTHealth to outline facts about the COVID-19 vaccine. He was vaccinated during a Thursday afternoon event to help encourage others, especially in the Black and Hispanic communities that have been disproportionately affected by the virus, to get the vaccine when available.

Researchers evaluating whether an investigational oral drug, vadadustat, can help prevent acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in COVID-19 patients were awarded $5.1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to expand the Phase II clinical trial at UTHealth. “In addition to vaccination, we direly need treatments to prevent ARDS, one of the deadliest complications of severe COVID-19. If we can arrest coronavirus infection at an earlier stage before the onset of lung complications that cause mortality, COVID-19 outcomes would be so much better,” commented Holger Eltzschig, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Anesthesiology with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. 

Dr. Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health, explains the COVID-19 variant and its potential impact.

As COVID-19 vaccines become available to those on the front lines of the pandemic response and the general public, the UT System and UTHealth are partnering with state and local officials to strongly encourage vaccination. At a December 30 press conference, UT System and UTHealth leaders, along with the elected officials, provided factual information about the COVID-19 vaccines, including vaccine safety, who is eligible to receive the two-dose vaccine, and why everyone who is eligible (especially those in higher risk categories) should choose to be vaccinated.

UTHealth received Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and is in the process of inoculating its front-line workers. UTHealth will receive subsequent allocations from state and federal agencies until all employees, students, and trainees who have chosen to receive the vaccine have been given the opportunity to do so.

Doctors and researchers with UTHealth who have been working tirelessly on the COVID-19 front lines shared their pockets of gratitude in the midst of a challenging year. A mental health expert with UTHealth says reminiscing on the moments that brought joy in this last year can help with both mental and physical wellbeing, as research has shown that expressing gratitude can lead to increased activity within the parts of the brain that facilitate decision-making, reward-anticipation, empathy, and emotion.

Some families have chosen to create a COVID-19 social bubble to celebrate the holidays this year, after the NBA leveraged the technique during its most recent season. But creating a bubble requires two weeks of diligent quarantine, testing, and temperature checks for anyone planning to be included. UTHealth experts say the best way to guarantee safety is to celebrate the holidays virtually with anyone who lives outside of your home. If you do plan to gather, Michael Chang, MD, infectious disease pediatrician with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and UT Physicians, offers advice on how to maximize safety.

Researchers from UTHealth's School of Public Health reported that one in three Americans said they had consumed alcohol at harmful "binge drinking" levels during the coronavirus pandemic. The findings also showed that binge drinkers consumed an extra 19 percent for every week in lockdown, compared to what they drank prior to the pandemic.

UTHealth infection disease experts explain the authorization, approval and distribution process for the COVID-19 vaccine.

Dr. Luis Ostrosky, a professor of infectious diseases at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, answers questions regarding the upcoming COVID-19 vaccine, including the number of doses to achieve the optimal level of protection, having pre-existing allergies, and vaccine temperature needed to safely inject.

Experts at UTHealth caution that it requires unwavering commitment to a two-week period of testing, temperature checks, and quarantine from all parties involved to create a “family bubble” for the holidays. They provide steps to take to have the highest chances of accomplishing a coronavirus-free get-together.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is the deadliest complication of COVID-19, a life-threatening injury that allows fluid to leak into the lungs, causing extreme breathing difficulties that often require treatment with a ventilator. Laura Moore, MD, trauma surgeon with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, is leading a clinical trial on a stem cell therapy for patients with severely injured lungs that may benefit those suffering through the most devastating consequence of COVID-19.

Getting a COVID-19 test immediately after Thanksgiving may not give you an accurate result, according to Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health. Dr. Troisi explains the COVID-19 incubation period, timing for the different types of tests and her recommendations for quarantine periods before the next holiday gathering.

While staying home is the option that guarantees the most safety – and is what the CDC and most public health officials are recommending – if you travel or entertain visitors, infectious disease experts with UTHealth provide some advice to help keep you safe.

Neurologists are researching whether a novel immunomodulatory treatment, OP-101, can reduce lung and brain injury in hospitalized COVID-19 patients through a clinical trial at UTHealth. OP-101 is an investigational compound designed to selectively attack the immune cells responsible for hyperinflammation, lung injury, and multi-organ failure caused by infections.

A Phase III clinical trial to assess if a potential vaccine is effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 is now open for enrollment by UTHealth in collaboration with Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. Led by Roberto C. Arduino, MD, professor of infectious disease with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, this trial seeks to enroll 30,000 individuals across the nation. The Houston research site is the UTHealth Clinical Research Unit at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. The local trial, which started in late October, is looking to enroll 200 people considered a high-risk of contracting COVID-19, in particular older patients, and minorities, since they’re disproportionately affected by COVID.

New data shows some types of transportation do not carry the risk that they did at the beginning of the pandemic. Michael Chang, infectious disease pediatrician with UTHealth, explains what to consider before making holiday travel plans.

When COVID-19 began, there was no existing published guideline on how to manage a highly infectious virus in a freestanding psychiatric hospital. UTHealth clinicians and staff have since created a strategy for the UTHealth Harris County Psychiatric Center to provide the best psychiatric care while maintaining a safe environment during the pandemic. Their strategy for the largest provider of inpatient psychiatric care in the Greater Houston area was published in the October issue of Psychiatry Research.

Roberto C. Arduino, MD, professor of infectious disease with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, is leading a research team that is studying the effectiveness of multiple COVID-19 outpatient treatments in preventing mild cases from advancing to severe illness. An adaptive clinical trial is now enrolling patients at Harris Health System’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, where researchers will observe patient outcomes and any side effects that occur during the trial.

To help public health professionals and scientists better understand the spread of COVID-19 in Texas and the immune response it causes in individuals, researchers at UTHealth are partnering with the Texas Department of State Health Services to launch the Texas Coronavirus Antibody Response Survey (Texas CARES). Texas CARES will determine the proportion of people throughout Texas who have COVID-19 antibodies, indicating a past infection and presumably some degree of immune protection.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to induce stress for many, a team of multidisciplinary mental health specialists with UTHealth is leveraging telemedicine to connect students experiencing emotional or behavioral crisis with sustainable care. Through the Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine (TCHATT) program, UTHealth has partnered with seven school districts in the Greater Houston area to prevent unnecessary psychiatric hospitalizations in youth and connect them with community support for therapy, psychiatry, and positive development. The program is part of the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium, which was created by the 86th Texas Legislature in 2019, and seeks to establish and improve access to care for children throughout the state. 

Pregnant Hispanic patients were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19 than other racial/ethnic groups and most were asymptomatic, according to research by UTHealth. The clinical study was the largest and most diverse universally tested obstetric cohort to date, and the first for COVID-19 pregnancy data from the Southern part of the U.S.

The holiday season is quickly approaching and many are eager to spend long-awaited time with loved ones to end a challenging year. But the critical question underlying travel during the COVID-19 pandemic lingers: Is it safe? Infectious disease experts with UTHealth provide some advice to help guide your decisions.

Michael Chang, MD, assistant professor of infectious diseases at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, explains the effectiveness of face shields for preventing COVID-19 infection spread. For maximum safety, Dr. Chang recommends using shields for eye protection, coupled with face masks that cover the nose and mouth.

“It’s now clear the virus will be in our communities longer, and as such, we don’t want the public to be putting off health maintenance and important screenings like mammography,” said Pamela Berens, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. Dr. Berens explains why it is important to continue regular screenings and the precautions that UT Physicians clinics are taking to ensure patient safety.

Susan Wootton, MD, pediatric infectious disease specialist with UT Physicians and associate professor of pediatrics at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, offers tips to help keep families safe this Halloween. The newly adopted rituals – wearing a mask, social distancing, and proper handwashing hygiene – should be integrated into trick-or-treating and other fall activities this year.

Researchers at UTHealth are investigating if Regeneron’s antibody treatment -- which is currently used for tetanus, rabies, hepatitis B, and some herpes exposures -- could prevent COVID-19 in people who have had sustained exposure to someone with the virus. "If this trial demonstrates that this treatment is effective, it could be used in various settings where exposure risk is heightened, such as health care, airlines, meatpacking factories, nursing homes, and among first responders," said Roberto C. Arduino, MD, the study's lead investigator at UTHealth.

To help reduce COVID-19-related health disparities in vulnerable populations in Texas, a multi-institutional team of researchers led by UTHealth will identify disease hotspots and testing deserts in three racially diverse areas, and then develop and evaluate intervention strategies to increase COVID-19 testing. The study is funded by a $5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to UTHealth through the Center for Clinical and Translational Science.

UTHealth has established the UTHealth COVID-19 Center of Excellence. The center includes the first post-COVID-19 clinic in Houston at UT Physicians, the clinical practice of McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, which is dedicated to helping adults and children who are still suffering the aftermath of one of the deadliest viruses in global history.

A combination antibody treatment for preventing COVID-19 illness in individuals who have had sustained exposure to someone with the virus is being studied by researchers at UTHealth. Led by Roberto C. Arduino, MD, professor of infectious disease with McGovern Medical School, the clinical trial is enrolling patients at Harris Health System’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital.

Experts with UT Physicians and the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth explain common viruses in children during the fall and winter seasons, providing advice on what do to if your child gets sick in the midst of the pandemic. 

Pushan Jani, MD, MSc, assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, provides tips on how to avoid asthma attacks and possible hospitalization during a pandemic.

Soma Jyothula and Manish Patel, professors at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, performed a double lung transplant, one of the first in the United States for the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Soma Jyothula and Manish Patel, professors at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, performed a double lung transplant, one of the first in the United States for the disease caused by the coronavirus.

A study on the effectiveness of multiple treatments, including laboratory-made antibodies, in preventing mild COVID-19 from advancing to severe illness in the outpatient setting is underway by researchers at UTHealth. The clinical trial is enrolling patients at Harris Health System’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital.

Experts have warned against the use of anti-inflammatory medications, such as ibuprofen, to treat COVID-19 symptoms. In a review report, researchers at UTHealth suggest that when anti-inflammatory medications are administered could impact the body’s response to the drug without interfering with the immune system’s fight against the virus. Harry Karmouty-Quintana, PhD, and Seung-Hee Yoo, PhD, both assistant professors of biochemistry and molecular biology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, looked into how taking the circadian rhythm into account can help target the optimal time the body can use a particular medication.

This year, in addition to the normal routine of navigating school supplies, books, and course schedules, parents also have to consider something new: the mental health effects of COVID-19. Melissa Goldberg, PsyD, a clinical assistant professor in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, offers tips on how to ease separation anxiety during the pandemic.

Using a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health, physician-scientists at UTHealth will investigate whether convalescent plasma infusions can prevent the progression of COVID-19 in one of the first randomized clinical trials in the country.

A new research study investigating symptoms of COVID-19 experienced in patients with and without cancer is being launched by an interprofessional team of researchers and clinicians at UTHealth and UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. Leading the study is Meagan Whisenant, PhD, APRN, assistant professor at Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth, in collaboration with Loretta A. Williams, PhD, APRN, an associate professor in the Department of Symptom Research at MD Anderson.

While many offices continue to enforce work-from-home protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are many more that are open for business and concerned about keeping their workforces safe and healthy. UT Physicians developed a corporate COVID-19 testing program to help businesses and organizations provide a safe and healthy workplace. As a part of UTHealth, UT Physicians care team members gather patient information, collect samples, test them, and report results in two to three days to help businesses keep operations going safely.

Michael Yafi, MD, associate professor of pediatric endocrinology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, shares insight into the impact COVID-19 has on children with diabetes, how uncontrolled diabetes can increase health risks, and offered tips on how to manage diabetes.

With delayed school openings and possible continued virtual learning for all during the pandemic, weight gain could affect even the youngest of Americans and cause lingering negative health issues for a generation of youth. Deborah Horn, DO, MPH, medical director of the Center for Obesity Medicine and Metabolic Performance at UTHealth, offers at-home diet and exercise tips for children to help minimize weight gain.

Daphne Hernandez, PhD, associate professor at Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth, has received a $25,000 Dean’s Research Award to further study how Hispanic immigrant families get information about COVID-19, their beliefs about the disease, how socio-economic factors are affecting their health behaviors, and the overall impact of COVID-19 and other stressors on mental health.

The effectiveness of remdesivir in the treatment of coronavirus is among 35 COVID-related research projects that are being conducted at Harris Health System hospitals in conjunction with researchers at UTHealth’s McGovern Medical School and the Baylor College of Medicine.

UT Physicians has published a Spanish COVID-19 information center website. A replica of its English counterpart, the center helps individuals stay up to date on the virus in the Spanish language.

Early rehabilitation of COVID-19 survivors is important to reduce long-term complications, according to researchers at UTHealth. In a review report, experts explored different interventions and provided a guide on how critically ill patients who have recovered from COVID-19 can rehabilitate and get back to their normal lives.

UTHealth recently launched a new COVID-19 tracking tool that can tell Texans what is happening in real time in their own communities and anticipate how one person can infect dozens more. TexasPandemic.org, developed by public health researchers in collaboration with biostatisticians and data scientists, is a free tool available to the community to inform public health decision-making across the state.

UTHealth provides recommendations that will help give both parents and their children some idea of what to expect for the next school year.

Physicians are studying whether vadadustat, an investigational therapy, could protect the lungs of COVID-19 patients by triggering the body’s protective response to low oxygen levels in a randomized Phase II clinical trial at UTHealth.

An interventional therapy by physicians at UTHealth, aimed at improving survival chances and reducing the need for critical care treatment due to COVID-19, is underway at Memorial Hermann - Texas Medical Center and Harris Health System’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital. The clinical trial is investigating the effectiveness of the drug ramipril, an ACE inhibitor, at reducing the severity of COVID-19.

An early prognosis factor from a simple blood draw could be a key to determining who will suffer greater effects from COVID-19. Researchers at UTHealth made the discovery that could help clinicians better prepare for these patients. Results of the findings were published in the International Journal of Laboratory Hematology.

A research team at UTHealth is the first in Texas to investigate whether plasma from COVID-19 survivors can be used in outpatient settings to prevent the onset and progression of the virus in two new clinical trials.

Differences in lung physiology and immune function in children could be why they are more often spared from severe illness associated with COVID-19 than adults, according to a recent paper by pediatric and adult physicians at UTHealth and Baylor College of Medicine, who teamed up to investigate the disparity.

McGovern Medical School students at UTHealth created the Covert Undercover Virus Response Team to help frontline attending physicians and residents. The student volunteers have collected personal protective equipment for them and tutored their children as school went virtual during COVID-19.

A drug is being studied for its effectiveness in treating a type of severe immune overreaction seen in patients with COVID-19-induced pneumonia by researchers at UTHealth. The clinical trial is enrolling patients at Harris Health System’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital.