A faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin who works to improve the security and reliability of computer software systems has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship for 2015.

In 2015, the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) celebrates its 10th anniversary. In honor of that milestone, we are checking in with some of the alumni of the FRI program who use what they learn in interesting ways. Olivia Biehle, an undergraduate double-majoring in Mathematics and Radio-TV-Film, combines her two very different passions through 3D filmmaking. She also used movie-making skills in her involvement with the Cosmic Dawn FRI research stream, as she explains in an interview.

Public officials are used to hearing economists’ expertise on decisions about the economy and listening to diplomats about foreign policy, so why shouldn’t scientists help national, state and local leaders make better decisions about science and technology?

Following is an except from an article that originally appeared on the website of the Texas Advanced Computing Center on January 28, 2015:

In the world of living things, surely one of the oddest relationships is the one between certain insects and the bacteria they can't seem to live without. Such bacteria, called obligate symbionts live inside the host's cells. They're distinct organisms -- they have their own DNA separate from that of the host. And yet, if you try to remove the bacteria, the host dies. And vice versa.

Dozens of students gathered at the McCombs School of Business this week to pitch their innovations to investors at the Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition. College of Natural Sciences (CNS) graduate students were among the groups presenting their inventions.

A fast-growing bacterial strain found on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin in the 1950s might ultimately prove useful for carbon sequestration, biofuel production, biosynthesis of valuable chemicals and the search for novel pharmaceuticals, scientists announced in newly published paper.

Below are a few of the upcoming public lectures and events for February. All of these presentations are free and open to the public.

With the arrival of the spring semester, hundreds of first-year undergraduates in the College of Natural Sciences will join one of 27 research streams in the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI), searching for answers to some of modern science's most pressing questions, and gathering important research experience along the way.

With the most recent Fields Medal, the major award for math, going to a woman for the first time, more attention than usual has been on the under-representation of women in math graduate programs. The American Mathematical Society found that on average 22.5 percent of Ph.D. math students in Group I (top-tier) math departments are women. However, at UT Austin, which has a Group I department, an increasing share of the math graduate students are women. They include Maja Taskovic, a fifth-year graduate student, and her sister Milica Taskovic, a first-year graduate student. Today, 32 percent of all UT Austin math graduate students are women, and in the new 2014 cohort that Milica belongs to, women make up 43 percent of Ph.D. candidates.