College of Natural Sciences Faculty Receive NSF CAREER Awards

Scientists studying topics relevant to mitigating climate change, the loss of coral reefs, drug discovery, species conservation and improvements in data analysis are among the College of Natural Sciences faculty who have earned recent Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards from the National Science Foundation. The award recognizes faculty in the first part of their careers for their potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Simon Brandl, assistant professor of marine science, is an ecologist who studies the ecology, evolution and functional role of marine fishes. He is particularly interested in some of the most common but difficult to see fish, known as cryptobenthic fishes, or just cryptos. These fishes, such as gobies and blennies, are small and live at the bottom of many coastal ecosystems, from coral reefs to local oyster reefs in Texas. While they are often overlooked, they are extremely abundant in tropical coastal ecosystems worldwide, account for almost one-tenth of all vertebrate diversity on Earth, and, importantly, feed many of the large fishes humans eat. As such, understanding how current environmental change affects these fishes, their role for coastal marine ecosystems, and ultimately, the provision of food to human societies is critically important. Brandl’s NSF CAREER award supports research to investigate how vital elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, minerals and vitamins, move through the fish community in coral reef ecosystems.

Caroline Farrior, associate professor of integrative biology, studies the interacting mechanisms that drive variation in plant communities across environmental gradients. She is particularly interested in understanding the mechanisms that could play a large part in shifting the ecosystem services (including carbon storage) within various ecosystems as the climate continues to change. Farrior integrates large datasets, experiments and new theoretical work to uncover insights into the connections between individual-level physiology and emergent ecosystem functioning. Her NSF CAREER award supports research to integrate the data from large-scale forest dynamics plots (ForestGEO) with theory to develop models and test hypotheses regarding the drivers of forest dynamics and emergent structure within and across biomes. The results of this work are likely to improve the basis of forest dynamics within the Earth-system models used to predict carbon sequestration and thus the role of forests in slowing or accelerating climate change.

Ku-Lung “Ken” Hsu, associate professor and holder of the Stephen F. and Fay Evans Martin Endowed Professorship in Chemistry, focuses on the discovery of bioactive molecules in his research. A central theme of his lab’s work is the development of covalent probes and inhibitors for investigating protein and lipid activity. His research is multidisciplinary and uses a combination of organic synthesis, bioanalytical chemistry and bioorganic chemistry. Current efforts include identifying new reactive chemistry, quantifying ligandability of proteins on a proteomic scale and deciphering structure and function of membrane signals in living systems, including in pursuit of new molecules to enable chemical biology and therapeutic discovery. Hsu is a CPRIT (Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas) Scholar, whose NSF CAREER award supports research that aims to understand metabolic regulation of cellular function at the single-cell level. His team seeks to establish a fundamental understanding of how identical cells differentiate into functionally distinct cell lineages. 

Melissa Kemp, assistant professor of integrative biology and of Earth and planetary sciences, studies how biodiversity is shaped by global change phenomena through time and across space. Her work integrates paleobiology with ecology, evolution and conservation to understand extinction, diversification and colonization dynamics in vertebrate systems. Kemp’s award supports research that leverages the fossil record of Jamaica to characterize ancient biodiversity and quantify how it has been shaped by environmental changes before and after human colonization of the island. The research seeks to guide conservation strategies in an ecosystem that supports a diversity of wildlife and human populations.

Jared Murray, assistant professor of statistics and data sciences, works on developing flexible Bayesian multivariate models for heterogeneous and structured data, with applications to multiple imputation for missing data, latent variable modeling and causal inference. His award supports developing new methods for matching records across files in the absence of unique identifiers and for making inference using the combined files. Murray also has an appointment in the Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management in the McCombs School of Business and holds the title of Harkins and Company Centennial Distinguished University Chair Fellow.