T S I T N E I C S S A HT E TEX ISSUE 2 • JANUARY 2015
WILL THE NEXT BIG IDEA COME FROM A MACHINE?
2 SNAP!
Leapin’ Lizards On small islands in Florida, a native species of green anole lizards quickly changed behavior— and more—after an invasive species of brown anole lizards came to inhabit the same islands. UT Austin postdoctoral researcher Yoel Stuart observed the green anoles perching higher in trees, as they competed for food and space with the newcomers (and maybe also because brown anoles eat green anole hatchlings). In just 15 generations or about 20 years, the green anoles had rapidly evolved to become better at gripping the higher-up branches, with larger toe pads that helped their feet to cling. “The speed of the evolutionary response surprised us,” Stuart says, “but it reinforced the growing notion that, when survival and reproduction depend on it, evolution can take place in just a few generations.”
3 CONTENTS
A digest of the people and groundbreaking discoveries that make the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin one of the most amazing and significant places on Earth. #discoverystartshere
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10 SPENCER WELLS
12 A MORE STABLE
13 GETTING
14 A VEGETABLE
15 MUTATION
16 CRAZY ANTS VS.
17 TAKING CHARGE
18 PETER ONYISI
20 SCIENCE
22 MAJA AND MILICA
FIRE ANTS
SOURCE OF STABLE ISOTOPES
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24 THEN AND NOW
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GIANT MAGELLAN TELESCOPE
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GROWING NEURONS
CANCER TO SELF-DESTRUCT
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PREDICTING OUTBREAKS
A DAY
VISUALIZED
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Apoptosis
26 INTELLIGENCE, DESIGNED
30 ELVIRA MARQUEZ
32 FOR A BIG IMPACT, GO SMALL
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FINGERPRINTING WINE
BLOCKS DRUNKENNESS (AT LEAST IN WORMS)
TASKOVIC
4 LETTER FROM THE DEAN Dear Friends, A spirit of discovery leads to remarkable breakthroughs. That spirit guides us at the College of Natural Sciences, and you’ll find it on every page of this edition of The Texas Scientist. Our scientists and mathematicians pursue breakthroughs each day. Whether they’re creating mirrors for a telescope more powerful than any on Earth, manipulating cancer into destroying itself, creating tour-guiding robots, or unraveling mysteries of particle physics, it’s all in a day’s work for our community of researchers. “A spirit of discovery” also describes our students and our approach to education. It’s true of our freshmen first setting foot on campus, as they learn about what to expect from their college experience. And it’s true for the people behind the innovative teaching programs that help our College produce the STEM-educated graduates our world needs. In this issue, we feature one such program, CNS Cornerstones, our strategy at this large university to make sure the newest Longhorns have small-group learning communities. They’re getting support, getting advice, and getting connected with like-minded people who are on the same educational path. We want to stay connected with you. Throughout these pages you’ll find links to more resources online—scientific discoveries, extended interviews, videos, and blasts from the past. When you stop by our website, please take a moment to sign up for our monthly e-newsletter. If you already receive our e-news, click on one of our social media links to join the conversation on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram. Visit cns.utexas.edu/alumni-friends. We are excited to share the breakthroughs and innovations of the College of Natural Sciences with you, and we’re thankful that you’re a part of our community and success.
Linda Hicke
Editor Christine Sinatra Contributing Writers Marc Airhart Steve Franklin Design David Steadman Jenna Luecke Illustrations Jenna Luecke Marianna Grenadier Photography Credits: P. 2: Yoel Stuart. P. 11: Eduardo Rubiano. P. 15: Karishma Kaushik. Pp. 19, 23, 31: Jeff Wilson. Pp. 32–33: Brett Buchanan. Image Credits: Pp. 5–6: Giant Magellan Telescope—GMTO Corporation. P. 7: [top] Roger Harris/Science Photo Library; [middle] Krishna Vadodaria, Brain Research Institute, Univ of Zurich, Switzerland. P. 18: ATLAS image provided by CERN. P. 24 Prints and Photographs Collection, di_09850, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. Email: cnsnews@austin.utexas.edu Phone: 512-471-4641 Address correspondence to: The Texas Scientist 120 Inner Campus Dr. G2500 Austin, Texas 78712 The Texas Scientist is a publication of the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.
5 Impress your friends with fun facts about how scientists today are applying new learning and technology to age-old questions.
SCIENCE IN MOTION
6 SCIENCE IN MOTION
GIANT MAGELLAN TELESCOPE What an Extremely Large Telescope Sees
When it is ready for use in 2021, the Giant Magellan Telescope, supported in part by the University of Texas at Austin, will be larger than any telescope in existence today. It will use seven of the largest optical mirrors ever made that weigh 12.5 tons each. The resulting telescope will measure over 80 feet in diameter. It is a result of a major international collaboration of partners in the United States, Australia, Korea, and Brazil, and UT Austin is one of five U.S. universities involved. Dan Jaffe, chair of the Department of Astronomy, co-designed an advanced first-generation instrument for the telescope in collaboration with two other institutions. The Giant Magellan Telescope Near Infrared Spectrograph will study young stars, extrasolar planets, and other astronomical targets that radiate in the midinfrared.
“This is the leading edge of science, and it is where Texas must be.” UT Austin President Bill Powers
Applications: This Telescope Can… • Produce images ten times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope • Discover planets around other stars and determine if they’re habitable • Search for signs of life • Probe formation of the earliest stars • Measure masses of black holes • Explore fundamental issues in cosmology and physics, like dark matter and dark energy Meet One of the Team Dan Jaffe Chair of the Department of Astronomy
Go online to learn more at: gmto.org
7 GROWING NEURONS How to Boost Neurogenesis
TEXT
Old View You’re born with all the neurons you’ll ever have. As you age, they die off.
Neural Progenitor Immature Mature stem cells neuron granule cell cell
SCIENCE IN MOTION
New View Adults are constantly growing new neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain linked to memory and emotions. That’s good news since neurogenesis helps with memory and learning and makes it easier to cope with stress.
How Neurogenesis Works In an adult hippocampus, new neurons come from neural stem cells and progenitor cells. These cells divide, mature and send out branchlike dendrites, allowing the new neuron to communicate with other neurons.
What Stimulates Neuron Growth
New learning
Novel experiences
Exercise
Applications: To be licensed, London taxi drivers have to memorize 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks. After two or more years of study, those who passed the test had bigger hippocampi; those who failed, didn’t. Animal studies suggest neurogenesis may contribute to a larger hippocampus. Mice that have been genetically modified not to experience neurogenesis also have trouble learning and respond more quickly to stressors.
Meet the Scientist Michael Drew Professor of Neuroscience
Reducing your stress load
8 SCIENCE IN MOTION
PREDICTING OUTBREAKS Supercomputers Help Forecast Diseases’ Spread
How an infectious disease spreads depends on the social lives of the people living near the outbreak. Using math, advanced statistics, and high-powered supercomputers, it’s possible to model the complex web of daily interactions that occur at school, home, work, healthcare settings, and in the community to predict the way diseases like influenza spread. Applications: Knowing where, when, and how quickly a dangerous pathogen is likely to spread is key to controlling an outbreak. The Texas Pandemic Flu Toolkit is an online resource that allows public health officials to simulate pandemics on supercomputers at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The toolkit also includes decision-support tools that help officials plan for future crises, determine how and where to use limited supplies of medicines and vaccines, and deploy other disease-fighting resources. When a relatively new and deadly disease like Ebola unfolds on the other side of the globe, forecasting can be difficult. Dr. Lauren Meyers and colleagues have projected the current Ebola epidemic using a combination of epidemiological data (numbers of cases occurring each day) and genomic sequences from the circulating Ebola virus. Studies of prior Ebola outbreaks in Africa suggest that a large number of people may have been immunized by exposure to Ebola without getting sick. Dr. Meyers’ research team is trying to determine whether silent immunity exists, in the hopes of improving forecasts and the ability of doctors and nurses on the frontlines to more safely treat sick patients. Meet the Scientist Lauren Ancel Meyers Mathematical Biologist
Go online for videos about Meyers’ work in mathematical epidemiology: links.utexas.edu/cdbxdki
9 SCIENCE IN MOTION FINGERPRINTING WINE How Chemical Sensors Can Analyze What’s in Your Glass Chemical sensors can tell a wine’s: Grape varietal Hang-time on the vine Year of harvest
How it Works Each well in a sensor’s array has a different engineered molecule that interacts with various chemical components of wine. Changes in color and brightness indicate different properties. Dozens of wells in an array yield thousands of possible patterns. By comparing them with those of known standard samples, a computer reveals the wine’s chemical makeup. Peptidic sensor array
Applications: Catch fraud, Improve wine In 2012, a wine seller fraudulently labeled spirits and lost a class action suit. The offender’s settlement included a payout of $165,000 toward future related UT Austin research, including the “Supramolecular Sensors” stream of the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI). One day, winemakers will know more about when to harvest and how long to age their wine. The chemists plan to develop an “electronic tongue,” combining a range of different sensors on one small, cheap chip. That would replace rooms full of costly equipment and (gulp) maybe even human wine tasters.
Meet the Team
Eric Anslyn Professor of Chemistry
Eman Ghanem FRI Research Educator
Zinfandel
Cabernet Sauvignon
Pinot Noir
Shiraz
Countless graduate and undergraduate students in Dr. Anslyn’s FRI Stream
10 TEXT Q&A
The Alumnus
SPENCER WELLS, BS, 1998
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. Interviewed by Marc Airhart.
“At the genetic level, we’re 99.9 percent the same. We’re all part of an extended human family.”
In 2005, you launched the Genographic Project, which asks people from around the world to swab their cheeks and send in DNA samples to build understanding of how humans populated the planet. How did that project start? The folks at National Geographic asked me, if you could do anything, what would it be, which is a cool question. I told them we needed more genetic samples. We had only a handful of genetic markers at the time, and I talked about expanding that to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. That way, we could explore the dawn of agriculture, the journey of the Polynesians across the Pacific, and on and on. They said that’s a big idea: let’s do it. Now that the program is 10 years old, are there still new things to learn? Always. People are now sharing their family stories online. So instead of telling you that you have northwestern European origins, maybe we can start to tell you down to a specific village where your ancestors came from. We can dig in and get more of the details from the stories and discover things we didn’t expect. In other areas, such as looking at genes preserved in fossils, we now know that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred. All those things drive the science forward.
Has your work in the genetics of human populations over time changed your perspective on your own place within the human community? Yes. That’s the social message behind what we do. If you look at the world the way Linnaeus did in the 18th century, you would think there are lots of human races. We look so different in terms of skin color, eye color, hair color. The stuff you can see on the surface is so different that it seems there must be deepseated differences. But it turns out that that’s all wrong. We all share a recent common ancestor in Africa in the last 200,000 years. All of the diversity we see is a result of migration patterns over the last 60,000 years or about 2,000 human generations. That’s a blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense. At the genetic level, we’re 99.9 percent the same. We’re all part of an extended human family. That person that seems so different from you is actually your cousin. So maybe you should treat him or her a little better.
Go online for an extended interview that includes Wells’ plans as part-owner of the blues club, Antone’s: links.utexas.edu/bncjvls
11 Q&A
12 DISCOVERY ZONE
Round-up of science discoveries from the past year
A MORE STABLE SOURCE OF STABLE ISOTOPES In nature, chemical elements can exist as a blend of different isotopes but to produce a single isotope—separated from the rest, enriched for technological use—requires complicated and expensive machinery. Various political, technical and environmental factors have led to a looming shortage of stable isotopes like lithium-7 and molybdenum-99, which are necessary for nuclear power and medical imaging respectively. As a result, stable isotopes are some of the world’s most expensive chemical commodities. Cold War-era machines known as calutrons now produce valuable isotopes in Russia, but the machines’ age, high operating costs and regional concentration have contributed to stable isotopes’ global supply problem. “One ounce of a stable isotope that needs the calutron to separate it can run around $3 million,” says UT Austin professor of physics and Sid Richardson Foundation Regents Chair Mark Raizen. “That’s roughly 2,000 times the price of gold. And that has held back certain medical therapies.”
Raizen and his colleagues recently devised a new method for enriching valuable stable isotopes that’s cheaper than existing methods for many isotopes and more environmentally friendly for others. Unlike the calutron, the new method, called MAGIS (for magnetically activated and guided isotope separation), needs little energy due to its use of low-powered lasers and permanent magnets. A less expensive, domestic source of stable isotopes like the MAGIS device could benefit national security, nuclear power, medical imaging, cancer therapies, nutritional diagnostics and more. “I believe this is world-changing in a way that is unique among all the projects that I have done. And I do feel passionately about it,” said Raizen, who has created a nonprofit entity, the Pointsman Foundation, to license the technology to explore and develop isotopes to benefit humanity.
Go online for a video rendering of MAGIS in action and two physicists’ debate about it: links.utexas.edu/ cgvdxby
e rc u o s c ti s e m o d , e iv s n e A less exp MAGIS e th e k li s e p to o is le b ta s of al n o ti a n t fi e n e b ld u o c e ic v de dical e m r, e w o p r a le c u n , ty ri u c se , imaging, cancer therapieansd more. nutritional diagnostics
13 DISCOVERY ZONE
Apoptosis
GETTING CANCER TO SELF-DESTRUCT Human cells work hard to maintain a stable concentration of ions inside their membranes. Disrupting this delicate balance can trigger programmed cell death known as apoptosis. Sparking that innate selfdestruct sequence in cancer cells by skewing their ion balance would be one way to combat the disease. Unfortunately, cancer cells change how ions get transported across the cell membrane in a way that blocks apoptosis. Almost two decades ago, scientists discovered a possible workaround in a substance that acts as a natural ion transporter and has an anticancer effect. Since then, according to Jonathan Sessler, the Roland K. Pettit Centennial Chair in Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, it has been a “chemist’s dream,” to find “synthetic transporters that might be able to do exactly the same job, but better, and also work for treating diseases such as cystic fibrosis.” Sessler and colleagues recently created a synthetic ion transporter that ferries sodium and chloride ions into cancer cells, causing the cells to self-destruct. The molecule works by binding to chloride ions, essentially surrounding each one in an organic blanket and allowing it to dissolve in the cell’s membrane. The transporter tends to use naturally occurring sodium channels in the cell’s membrane, bringing sodium ions along for the ride. Sessler notes that right now the synthetic molecule triggers apoptosis in both cancerous and healthy cells. To be useful in treating cancer, a version will have to be developed that binds only to cancerous cells. Sessler is optimistic about the potential to pair the self-destructioninducing molecule with other lab innovations that would let researchers target cancer cells specifically. He has work underway already toward this goal.
tly n e c re s e u g a e ll o c d n a r le s Ses created a synthetic ion sodium transporter that ferriescancer and chloride ions into s to cells, causing the cell self-destruct.
Go online for more about the study and Sessler’s personal battle with cancer: links.utexas.edu/vijjqp
14 DISCOVERY ZONE
A VEGETABLE A DAY For children struggling with obesity, eating vegetables may be as important as weight loss for a healthy future. In fact, even just a helping or two of the right vegetables each day has been found to have powerful effects. School cafeterias, families, policymakers and doctors have been looking for ways to address the growing epidemic of childhood obesity, which has roughly tripled in just the last generation. Now a study with research from UT Austin’s Jaimie Davis has found one solution may be serving more nutrient-rich vegetables. Those are the leafy greens like spinach or broccoli and orangish vegetables like carrots. Making these vegetables even a small part of the daily diet of children at risk for obesity reduced bad fats, improved insulin levels and decreased the children’s risk for liver problems, Type 2 diabetes and other complications of obesity. Many children in the study continued to eat fewer nutritious vegetables than what’s recommended by the USDA and did not lose any weight, yet they still experienced health gains. “We found that eating even one full serving of these vegetables daily can really have a pronounced effect on children’s health,” says Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Katherine Ross Richards Centennial Teaching Fellow. “A large leafy green salad as a regular part of lunch is enough to make a difference.”
Go online for more about the study and a video on Davis’ work to teach kids to garden: links.utexas.edu/cnqoca
these f o g in rv e s ll fu e n o n e v e “We found that eating really have a pronounced effect vegetables daily can on children’s health.”
15 DISCOVERY ZONE
Sober worms like this one wiggle more from side to side.
MUTATION BLOCKS DRUNKENNESS (AT LEAST IN WORMS) Imagine a James Bond drug that gave spies superhuman abilities to drink their opponents under the table while staying sober themselves, no matter the martinis. Scientists have another interest in keeping alcohol’s intoxicating effects at bay, namely to help alcoholics cope with addiction and withdrawal. Last year they discovered a way to prevent alcohol from activating a key target in the brain. They created mutant worms that can’t get drunk. The worms in question, Caenorhabditis elegans, typically model intoxication by crawling more slowly, wriggling less, and no longer laying eggs. Eggs build up in their bodies, and scientists can count them. Worms genetically engineered with the modified human alcohol target, based on a mutation discovered by neuroscience graduate student Scott Davis, showed none of these usual signs of having had too much. An alcohol target is any neuronal molecule that binds alcohol. Luckily, the mutation of this particular modified target, a neuronal channel called the BK channel, only affects its response to alcohol. That means no disruption to other important functions that the channel typically regulates, such as activities in the respiratory tract, neurons, blood vessels and bladder. Alcohol’s effects on the body are complex, though, and have many targets across the brain. That means more research will be needed to find out whether the mutation affects tolerance, craving, withdrawal and other relevant human symptoms that can’t be measured in worms. But Jon Pierce-Shimomura, assistant professor of neuroscience and member of the Waggoner Center, speculates that eventually the mutation used in the worms could lead to a drug that would help alcoholics and counteract the intoxicating and potentially addictive effects of alcohol.
are y d o b e th n o ts c e ff e s l’ o h Alco ets rg ta y n a m e v a h d n a x le p com across the brain.
Go online for further details about the study: links.utexas.edu/ucnvsg
come th o b ts n a re fi d e rt o p im d Crazy ants and re zil, where their ranges have from Argentina and Brame. overlapped for a long ti
16 DISCOVERY ZONE
Crazy ants secrete formic acid and smear it on their bodies to neutralize fireant venom.
Go online to watch a video of crazy ants detoxifying fire ants: links.utexas.edu/cwguvah
CRAZY ANTS VS. FIRE ANTS In our last edition, we reported that South American crazy ants are damaging homes and electric equipment as they overrun parts of the southeastern U.S., and they’re also displacing another invader: red fire ants. Since then, UT Austin scientists have figured out how crazy ants clobber fire ants with IronMan-like defenses that protect them against the main tool in a fire ant’s arsenal. Fire ants dominate most ant species by dabbing them with a powerful venom that anyone who has been stung by a fire ant has felt. In a feat of evolutionary one-upmanship, crazy ants secrete formic acid and smear it on their bodies in a way that neutralizes fire-ant venom. This chemical counter-weapon may act as armor. It makes crazy ants nearly invincible in skirmishes with fire ants over food and nesting sites. Crazy ants and red imported fire ants both come from Argentina and Brazil, where their ranges have overlapped for a long time. There, it’s like an insect version of “Rock, Paper, Scissors”: fire ants dominate most other ant species including species that dominate crazy ants, but crazy ants beat fire ants. Here, though, the detoxifying abilities of the crazy ant and the absence of the other species put fire ants at a disadvantage. “As this plays out, unless something new and different happens, crazy ants are going to displace fire ants from much of the Gulf Coast region of the southeastern U.S. and become the new ecologically dominant invasive ant species,” says Ed LeBrun, a research associate with the Texas Invasive Species Research Program at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory.
17 DISCOVERY ZONE e-
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TAKING CHARGE All-electric vehicles, like the Nissan Leaf, have been slow to catch on in the U.S., in part because they have a short driving range, require large, expensive batteries and take several hours to charge. To solve these problems, scientists and engineers have been experimenting with energy storage devices called pseudocapacitors that can charge and discharge much faster than commercial batteries. Combined with batteries, they offer the best of both worlds: long-term energy storage and rapid charging. Now a team of scientists led by Keith Stevenson, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin Regents Professor in Inorganic Chemistry, has developed the first of a new class of pseudocapacitor that could eventually lead to better electric vehicles. Unlike other devices, the team’s is the first to use oxygen anions (negatively-charged ions) instead of cations (positive ions) to store its energy. “One main advantage of oxygen ions is that they allow you to theoretically store double the energy, providing two electrons per ion stored,” said Tyler Mefford, graduate student and lead author of the study in Nature Materials. Another benefit is that, unlike cation-based pseudocapacitors, which use rare and expensive metals, this anion-based device uses cheap metals that are abundant in Earth’s crust. Improved pseudocapacitors may also find applications in fast-charging cell phones or in electric power grids to stabilize electricity flow from fickle solar panels and wind turbines.
Go online for more information on this and the year in discoveries: links.utexas.edu/ubbqqj
Pseudocapacitors are effective at storing energy in part because of the vacant spots where oxygen ions can be stored.
Unlike other devices, to the team’s is the first use oxygen anions ns) (negatively-charged iositive instead of cations (po y. ions) to store its energ
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18 TEXT Q&A
The Faculty Member
PETER ONYISI
Physicist and Assistant Professor in the College of Natural Sciences. Interviewed by Marc Airhart.
You were part of the team at CERN working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson particle. What questions did that discovery open up? The mass of the Higgs boson turns out to be very strange, neither too light nor too heavy to lend itself to easy explanations. That raises the possibility that our universe is inherently unstable. If that’s true, the universe might eventually destroy itself, assuming we don’t find any new physics to repair the problem. It’s actually easy to Peter with postdoc Yuriy Ilchenko and (former) fix if you add more particles undergraduate Victor Rodriguez in Geneva. to the theory.
“In 2016 you might hear, ’The LHC discovers second Higgs boson.’”
So it’s possible there are more particles waiting to be discovered? According to Supersymmetry, a theoretical framework that suggests every particle has a partner with similar but not quite the same properties, there should actually be five particles in the Higgs boson sector, not one. If these other particles exist, they would be totally different from the one we’ve found, but they would also be Higgs bosons. So we’ll start up the machine again and in 2016 you might hear, “The LHC discovers second Higgs boson.” Supersymmetry is appealing because it solves a lot of problems in physics, including dark matter. It’s the kitchen sink of solving theoretical problems. The downside is that no one has seen evidence of it yet, though lots of people are looking, of course.
You had only been involved with the Higgs search for about a year and a half when the discovery was announced. But there were people who had spent decades working on it. How did it feel to be the new person? For me, I happened to be in a good place at a good time. I wanted to be at the LHC, so it wasn’t that accidental. If I had been a postdoc five years earlier, I would not have had the opportunity. In the long-term scheme of things, I was fairly lucky. What do you enjoy about teaching? It’s like being a tour guide. You get to show people the wonders of physics, and sometimes they really enjoy it. You might say, “Look at this fantastic result or experiment.” When a student gets it or says, “Oh, wow, this is really neat,” then that makes my day.
Go online for an extended interview to learn what’s next for the Large Hadron Collider: links.utexas.edu/fwuhba
19 Q&A
20 SCIENCE VISUALIZED
Beautiful images from University of Texas at Austin labs
21 SCIENCE VISUALIZED
A marine copepod, smaller than a grain of rice, can dart away from predators at 500 body lengths per second. The winning image from this year’s Visualizing Science competition, by Brad Gemmell of the UT Marine Science Institute, was created using a new method of polarized light microscopy.
Go online for more award-winning images and interviews with the scientists who captured their beauty: links.utexas.edu/zgmkjk
22 TEXT Q&A
The Graduate Students
MAJA AND MILICA TASKOVIC
Fifth-year and first-year math graduate student sisters. Interviewed by Steve Franklin.
“I used to just watch Maja and my dad doing problems... a few years later I was following Maja’s path.”
You grew up in an area affected by conflict. Did growing up in Serbia influence your decision to study math? Maja: How our parents brought us up did. They really stressed the importance of being a good student and being the best at everything you do, so maybe you have a chance to succeed in life. That’s probably why, at least in my case, I started so early. Another consequence of what was happening in Serbia is that industry was falling apart, and there were very few opportunities for jobs. So the question was where are you heading? The safest choice was to do some kind of fundamental science. Milica: I completely agree. The whole education system there, too, is such that it makes you think well in advance to figure out what you want to do. Your father is a mechanical engineer, your mother is an accountant and your greatuncles were both math teachers. Does math run in the family? Maja: My dad insisted I had to learn it so he gave me math problems, and we started working them and gradually I just got very interested. I started going to competitions and kept liking it more and more. There were some competitions in Greece, in Bulgaria, and in the U.K. so I got to travel, which was a bonus.
Milica: Because I’m seven years younger, I used to just watch Maja and my dad doing problems, so one day my dad asked me if I wanted to try it all out, so I did, and a few years later I was following Maja’s path. What are you each researching in graduate school? Maja: I’m studying the Boltzmann Equation and properties of its solution. This equation is a very difficult one, and we try to find out as much as we can about the properties of the solution and how it behaves. At this level of research you don’t see explicit solutions like people usually get used to in classes like calculus. Instead people try to show they exist and then you work on looking at their properties, and that’s what we’re doing. It’s very abstract. Milica: I don’t know yet. What I can say right now is I am a θ little bit different ω j S d−2 than Maja in that I’m not that interested in S d−1 theory. I’m leaning towards applied math. I want to see something concrete. I think I might try to connect mathematics and programming or even biology. We’ll see. I have one more year to decide and to kind of explore. Vˆ
u ˆ
σ
Go online for our series of graduate student profiles: links.utexas.edu/xcpqjk
23 Q&A
24 THEN AND NOW
Welch Hall
Since its construction in 1929, Welch Hall has hosted chemists and many other Longhorns. One of UT Austin’s largest buildings, Welch now sees 10,000 or more students on a typical day, and faculty researchers here generate roughly $12 million in research awards for the University.
1929 Originally the Chemistry Building, what became Welch Hall was constructed after an earlier UT chemistry building burned down in 1926. The fire, caused by aging wiring, sparked a blaze that quickly reached stored chemicals, resulting in colorful explosions. Faculty and firefighters rushed to save the department’s most prized asset: the library. Many irreplaceable books and journals escaped with only a few dampened or singed pages. New wings were added to the building in 1959 and 1978. It was renamed Welch Hall in honor of Houston oilman and philanthropist Robert Alonzo Welch (1872–1952).
25 THEN AND NOW “Genius loci—translated roughly as ‘the guardian spirit of a place’—refers to the character that certain locations achieve when the natural, the constructed, and the interaction between the two work in harmony to create a special magic.” – Larry Faulkner, Chemist and Former UT Austin President
TODAY In 2015, the Texas Legislature will decide whether to move forward with muchneeded capital investments in Welch.
FUTURE Renovations would give students modern classrooms, better community spaces, safer labs—including dedicated labs for the Freshman Research Initiative—and needed upgrades.
dvocate /a rg .o s e x e s a x te t a ll a H h elc Learn how you can help W
26 FEATURE
, E C N E G I L L E INT D E N G I DES By Steve Franklin
Illustrated by Jenna Luecke
27 FEATURE UT Austin Villa soccer players criss-cross the field, kicking, scoring, colliding with opponents and working as a team. Their coaches get players to work seamlessly together, and they operate like a well-oiled machine—or a few such machines, really. These players, along with the students and professor who created them, took first place in the 2014 RoboCup Soccer 3D Simulation League, a sports match for robots. Welcome to the artificial intelligence age. These days, you’ll find AI in the workplace, the home, even on a sports pitch. From hospitals to highways, artificial intelligence offers new solutions to real-world problems. Scientists at UT Austin, one of the world’s top computer science programs, say artificial intelligence is enabling breakthroughs that will improve everyday life. But teaching an artificial system to be intelligent isn’t as easy as the movies make it look. Lots of time and energy go into training computers on seemingly simple concepts.
“You have to first appreciate the enormous gulf between computers and people. Computers are profoundly stupid machines,” says Bruce Porter, Chair of the Department of Computer Science. “If you can get a computer to do something smart, like IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy, you have to respect how much work went into that accomplishment. Because computers as they come out of the box are so useless, so stupid, to get them to do something intelligent like these systems have done is a tour de force.” Teaching Intelligence Consider the amount of computation your brain does for something as simple as catching a ball. It recognizes the object, calculates speed and direction, and computes where to intercept the ball. These are easy tasks for humans, but teaching them to a computer means tackling each piece separately. Kristen Grauman, head of the Computer Vision Group at UT Austin, teaches computers to understand what they see. For this, machines need to identify categories of objects or activities and communicate with humans. Part of teaching computers to recognize objects is getting them to decipher descriptive terms like furry, metallic, or formal. Imagine trying to explain furry to someone who has never held or seen an animal, and you get a sense of the challenge. To address the gap, Grauman is developing learning algorithms that can estimate the presence of descriptive attributes in images. Such predictions pave
“If you can get a computer to do something smart, like IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy, you have to respect how much work went into that accomplishment.”
28 TEXT FEATURE the way for clear communication between human “teachers” and visual recognition systems. A person can tell the system that dogs are furry, four-legged animals, and the system can conjure a model even before it’s shown actual image examples. Nuanced Learning An image retrieval project, WhittleSearch, builds on this technology to let people make relative comparisons between images, allowing users to fine-tune their search. “Suppose you have in mind what something looks like: your ideal handbag or pair of shoes, or the criminal you witnessed commit a crime. Trying to express that to a computer in words alone is quite limiting,” Grauman says. Instead, WhittleSearch allows users to give comparative feedback, like that the pair of shoes should be more formal, or the criminal had a broader nose. This way, the machine targets the right image from its vast database. Some of Porter’s work focuses on teaching human language. In Project Halo, he and his team successfully built a computer that
Self-driving Cars Peter Stone taught a Freshman Research Initiative course on autonomous vehicles where researchers worked with Austin Robot Technology to create an autonomous car named Marvin. The vehicle could drive in real-world settings while following the rules of the road. A future of self-driving vehicles and autonomous traffic management may not be far off. “Computers can already fly a passenger jet much like a trained human pilot,” Stone
could learn a science subject well enough to pass an Advanced Placement (AP) exam. This involved machines answering questions they had to work out the answers to, not ones for which they could simply retrieve information or perform a basic operation. Porter and his lab were also among the scientists who contributed expertise to the construction of IBM’s automated questionanswering system, Watson. Whereas search engines yield results from a keyword search, Watson actually answers questions posed to it, enabling the computer to beat two Jeopardy champions in 2011. In an upperdivision Automated Question Answering class taught by Porter and colleagues at UT Austin and six other universities, students build applications that use Watson to answer complex questions. Many artificial intelligence problems come down to getting machines to master similar higher-level processes that mirror learning and reasoning. “We’re never in exactly the same situation twice,” Peter Stone, director of UT’s Learning Agents Research Group explains. “If you’re a computer in a new situation you have to
notes. “Soon vehicles will be able to handle most of the driving tasks themselves, but once they’re popular, we’ll need to coordinate those vehicles on the streets.” To that end, Stone and his students developed virtual intersection systems to make auto travel safer and faster. In models, self-driving cars were able to move through intersections with little or no need to stop.
Go online to read an op-ed by Stone about why driverless cars will mean safety, convenience, and social change: links.utexas.edu/crwheau
29 FEATURE decide, not what action worked when I was exactly in this situation, but which actions in similar situations were good and which were bad.” Programming computers to recognize those nuances happens sometimes with a technique called reinforcement learning. Other approaches include evolutionary computation—which runs neural networks through a survival-of-the-fittest gauntlet modeled on the biological process of evolution, helping systems learn new behaviors—and multi-agent systems, a tactic that involves programming components to work together in ways that make the most of each part’s unique abilities. Ease and Safety Researchers see the potential for artificial intelligence to bring real societal benefits. Techniques that Stone and his team used in creating the robot soccer team could someday be employed to develop enhanced disaster-response robots. Some of Grauman’s artificial intelligence systems can capture and summarize video in ways that could prove useful for everything from national security to search and rescue efforts to helping people with memory impairment. Finding new ways to apply the technology to daily life, so people can go about their business more easily and safely, excites AI innovators. Stone and students in a Freshman Research Initiative course have worked to build that icon of artificial intelligence in popular culture: a helper robot. Students in the Autonomous Intelligent Robotics freshman research course work towards building robots that can navigate campus buildings and may one day make deliveries, answer questions and even act as tour guides for visitors. Risto Miikkulainen, director of UT’s Neural Networks Research Group, also points
Inevitably, artificial intelligence will also help us understand ourselves better. to the healing potential of some AI systems. He is working with colleagues at Yale on an AI strategy that models how schizophrenia forms in the brain. Researchers hope to devise new treatments for the complex disease based on what they learn. The Future Artificial intelligence experts foresee a future where AI unleashes new creativity and knowledge, not unlike what the Internet has done. “Creative problem-solving is a computational technique that’s just now coming of age because of the increase in computational power,” Miikkulainen says. “Once we are able to automate discovery, we will have solutions that we could not come up with as humans because the systems are too complex.” He posits that automated creativity could be used to design new kinds of robots, new kinds of cars and games that are more challenging. Porter envisions “an artificially intelligent science oracle—a computer-based system that we would consider to be the all-knowing authority in some area of science.” This oracle would be able to read every scientific article written in a certain field and could connect the dots between similar papers, passing that knowledge on to human researchers. Inevitably, artificial intelligence will also help us understand ourselves better. There are insights into human cognition, complexity and intelligence that come from teaching computers to emulate us. This is just one way that, Porter says, “Technology is making the world a better place.”
30 TEXT Q&A
The Undergraduate
ELVIRA MARQUEZ
Senior in Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS). Interviewed by Steve Franklin.
How did you land your first research position on campus before classes even started your freshman year? I saw UT was one of the universities doing research on Down’s syndrome, which interested me. The contact information was there for Prof. Jon Pierce-Shimomura, so I emailed him and said, “I’ll do anything you need, I just want to watch and see you do science.” And before school started he sent me an email that said, “Come and meet with me.” He said I could start coming to lab, and then I wound up working there for three years. What other research experiences have you had at UT? I participated in FRI [the Freshman Research Initiative]. I felt like that was where I learned failure. I would spend so much time on an experiment and then it wouldn’t work—but it was a learning experience: it was science. I really enjoyed the exposure to what actually happens when you do research.
“The Freshman Research Initiative was where I learned failure, but it was a learning experience: it was science.” Tell us about being a Texas Interdisciplinary Plan (TIP) mentor. I was a TIP scholar my freshman year and I absolutely loved it. Because TIP was so great to me, being a mentor is my opportunity to help other freshmen. I have four mentees. I help them look at the course schedule and help them find resources on campus. I really enjoy being a mentor. Do you have any favorite professors? One of my favorites is Dr. Amy Bryan in the HDFS department, who’s an inspiration. I’ve had the privilege to have her as a professor for three semesters and she is an inspiration and a beautiful human being. I’ve also had really great chemistry professors, Dr. Fakhreddine and Dr. Iverson. They just love what they’re doing and they demonstrate that every single day. I think, “I want to learn what you’re teaching because you’re so passionate about it.” Now that I’m going to be a teacher [Elvira was selected to join Teach for America], that’s exactly how I want to be in the classroom. I want kids to fall in love with science just like they made me fall in love with science.
Go online for more about Elvira and stories of our undergraduate researchers: links.utexas.edu/cvfkwzu
31 Q&A
32 FEATURE
, T C A P M I G I B FOR A L L A M S GO By Marc Airhart
Every week, as Sneha Patel stood in front of the roughly 20 freshmen she mentored and gave tips on how to navigate college, she would see a lot of heads nodding—but not in the back of the room. There sat one girl, always with her headphones on, not participating. Patel was surprised when the student signed up for one of the individual sessions she offered to each of her mentees. She probably won’t even show up, Patel thought. When the student did arrive for her meeting, she was very quiet at first. Then something shifted. “She told me that she had moved here with her family from Africa a couple of years ago,” says Patel. “She said the transition to
college was extremely hard—the culture, people, classes, dorm life, everything.” Their meeting, scheduled for 20 minutes, ended up taking an hour. After that, the student stopped sitting in the back of the weekly meetings. She made friends in the group and started participating in discussions. “By having that one-on-one experience, she could open up to somebody, and she realized this was a safe community where we help each other,” says Patel. “That really resonated with me, that I was able to help her become more comfortable here.” For students, the transition from high school to college can be a shock. You’re living
33 FEATURE in a totally new place, away from friends and family. The coursework is harder and there’s much more of it. Your roommate keeps leaving dirty clothes everywhere, and, meanwhile, you’re having second thoughts about your chosen major. All of this makes the first semesters of college a vulnerable time of heightened risk, when many students veer off course. We’re Here to Help This past fall, the College of Natural Sciences launched CNS Cornerstones (sometimes called CNS 101), a support program that assigns every first-year student to a small cohort of about 20 students with similar majors or career goals. It provides a structured experience to help guide them past potential pitfalls. The students take their core classes in biology, chemistry and math together. They study for tests together. They also have weekly meetings and social activities with an adult facilitator and a peer mentor. “The university is larger than many people’s home towns,” says David Vanden Bout, associate dean for undergraduate education. “We need to provide a way for everyone to have a community from the day they set foot on campus.” Freshman biology major Miranda Weed is from Lake Jackson, Texas (population 27,500). Some of her first classes had hundreds of students. “In such a huge class, you sit by different people every day, and you can’t really make connections with other students,” says Weed. “So it’s nice to have a different place where you can meet people in your class and you can study with them and you can talk to them about the class or see if they’re having the same issues as you.” Vanden Bout has four goals for the program: to help students succeed academically; to get them acclimated to life in college; to ensure they know how to navigate the university; and to encourage students to explore educational opportunities and career paths.
Each CNS Cornerstones small group has a peer mentor, like third-year biology major Sneha Patel. Peer mentors bring the first-hand experience of having gone through many of the same challenges just a few years earlier. “The peer mentors share stories about how they, too, were worried about passing their classes, but then figured out how to go to office hours for help or met with their TAs every week to talk about their homework,” says Vanden Bout. “I’m a first-generation college student,” says Weed. “Without this program, and especially Sneha, I would have no clue about what I need to do to become pre-med and get into medical school. She’s been a big help with that.”
CNS Cornerstones provides a way for everyone to have some community from the day they set foot on campus.
34 FEATURE For most students, the first semester of college feels like the hardest. Academic success, in large part, depends on how well they cope with the transition from high school to college.
Go online to read the New York Times Magazine article about improving graduation rates: nyti.ms/1ji4fTl
Lasting Connections The program leverages existing mechanisms at the university such as the longstanding First-year Interest Groups that allow student groups to meet weekly with both an adult facilitator and the peer mentor and infuses those programs with the Cornerstone ideas for what a freshman needs to be successful in the College of Natural Sciences. Topics range from time management to efficient study strategies to how to find university resources or how to explore majors and career paths. Professors that students would typically only see during class time in large lecture halls visit the weekly meetings to talk about their own personal stories and answer students’ questions. Mentors also organize social events— such as bowling, a campus scavenger hunt or a chemistry review disguised as a Jeopardy-style game show—to further cement friendships, orient students to the university and make learning fun. Unlike most other programs at the university designed to help students adjust to college life and be academically successful, CNS Cornerstones has students continue meeting regularly and taking courses together throughout their first year. Based on past experience with small academic community programs, Vanden Bout and others anticipate that many of the students will continue being friends and studying together for years after. “The greatest thing we’ve done for the students is to put them into small groups and give them the same classes,” says Vanden Bout. “So many great things come out of that.” He notes that for most students, the first semester of college feels like the hardest, even though academically they’ll go on to encounter much more difficult material. Their academic success, in large part, depends on how well they cope with the transition from high school to college. “Hopefully it won’t be the most critical semester soon,” says Vanden Bout. “Hopefully
we’ll start thinking, ‘What’s the next big hurdle for everyone?’ And it’ll no longer be the first semester because we’ll have figured out how to transition everyone into the university, and we can move on to the next big task.”
Blueprint for Success The Texas Interdisciplinary Plan (a.k.a., TIP Scholars) program dates back to 1999 and was part of the inspiration for CNS Cornerstones. TIP Scholars’ proven success at helping incoming freshmen who are considered at risk of not graduating on time, because of their socioeconomic background, academic performance or other factors, earned the program, and UT Austin, front-page coverage in the New York Times Magazine last May. Selected students join a small community that does a variety of structured activities together: studying, participating in social activities and attending core classes, including a critical thinking seminar. Students who participate in TIP Scholars have a 70 percent higher graduation rate than comparable students who don’t. Students often say it’s where they made their most important friends and academic contacts. Isaac Chavez, currently a Ph.D. candidate working with physics professor Mark Raizen, credited a TIP mentor with telling him about opportunities to do research as an undergraduate, which ultimately influenced his educational and career path. “I didn’t know you could do research as an undergrad,” says Chavez. “I ended up doing it and I loved it.”
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