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At the age of four Amir Husain fell in love with computers — in his words, he "became obsessed" with them. In his teens he began writing to his heroes, computer scientists like Niklaus Wirth, who created the Pascal programming language, and Nicholas Negroponte, a pioneer in the study of how humans interact with computers. They all wrote back. Amir left his home of Lahore, Pakistan to attend The University of Texas at Austin 8,000 miles away, drawn by the work of one of UT's computer science labs. While at UT, he found a kindred spirit in his wife Zaib, who was also from Lahore and a student at the McCombs School of Business.

During her graduate studies at The University of Texas at Austin, Lisa Piccirillo solved a problem that had bedeviled mathematicians for five decades. Her discovery, published in the Annals of Mathematics, excited the math world and drew coverage from The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Quanta, Popular Mechanics and more.

As a young boy, Prem Mahendroo loved to fly kites near the Ganges River in his hometown of Haridwar, India. He has a vivid memory of climbing up the side of his house to free one that had been trapped. A fall could have been deadly, but he was determined to grasp what was just beyond reach.

That moment provides a glimpse of Mahendroo's life and work. Throughout his career as a physicist, he reached beyond. He would become a pioneer in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research and is admired by Nobel Prize winners in the field.

How does a poor kid from tiny Alice, Texas grow up, go to a top research university, patiently pursue a new treatment for cancer that all the experts call crazy, and end up leading a revolution in cancer therapeutics that has already saved countless lives? Oh, and somehow manage to play harmonica with Willie Nelson and win a Nobel Prize too?

Out of the lab and into the marketplace. That could be the catch phrase for a growing number of UT Austin science students and faculty. They are pouring creativity and hard work into new efforts to bring UT science into new realms.

Nancy Moran, an evolutionary biologist at UT Austin, has built a career on groundbreaking findings about symbiotic relationships between insects and their internal bacteria. Among her many honors and awards, she is a National Academy of Sciences member, an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow and a MacArthur "Genius" fellow. She was recently profiled in the journal Science.

Texas Science alumni and friends were named among the winners of university alumni awards this year. Colonel (Ret.) Leon L. Holland, Alma Solis, and Michael Young will receive Distinguished Alumni Awards from the Texas Exes, the alumni association of the University of Texas at Austin.

A generous estate gift to The University of Texas at Austin from alumna and former physician Lorraine "Casey" Stengl will have a dramatic impact on educational efforts and scientific research examining plants, animals and their interactions with the natural world.

Three College of Natural Sciences alumni were selected for induction into the college's 2019 Hall of Honor.

It was 2006 when Juan Sequeda (BS '08, PhD '15), then a new UT Austin computer science transfer student, saw a fellow undergraduate drop a bunch of papers on the floor. When he bent over to help pick up the papers, he was surprised to see that they were research articles about an obscure subfield in computer science that Sequeda himself had recently become obsessed with: the Semantic Web.