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Several faculty in the College of Natural Sciences have been named the recipients of University-wide awards for their efforts to motivate and educate students at The University of Texas at Austin.

So you've been accepted to UT Austin's College of Natural Sciences. You've heard that doing research as an undergraduate will give you a leg up academically and in your career (really, research proves it). But how do you find a research lab to work in? How do you maximize the opportunity to work alongside some of the world's leading scientists and mathematicians? What do you do if you're on the brink of a big discovery, and then an overzealous cleaning crew throws out the colony of slugs it took you three months to raise and train in the lab?

Dean's Honored Graduate is the highest honor awarded to graduating seniors in the College of Natural Sciences. Honorees exhibit excellence in the classroom as well as substantial achievement in scientific research, an independent intellectual pursuit, or exceptional service and leadership to the college and university. These outstanding students are among the graduating seniors also receiving College of Natural Sciences Distinctions this year.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have awarded prestigious graduate research awards to 48 University of Texas at Austin students, including ten from the College of Natural Sciences.

Three faculty members from the College of Natural Sciences have received distinguished Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards totaling $1.6 million over 5 years from the National Science Foundation.

We're celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the periodic table. Join us as we tour the cosmos, from the microscopic to the telescopic, with four scientists studying the role of four elements—zinc, oxygen, palladium and gold—in life, the universe and everything.

Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), caused by everything from falls to being hit by moving objects to car crashes, cause nearly a third of all injury-related deaths in the U.S. Millions of survivors struggle with impaired thinking and movement, personality changes or depression.

Kami Hull, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded the 2018 Novartis Early Career Award in Chemistry. The award, presented to outstanding early‐career researchers who are within 10 years of establishing an independent research career, comes with an unrestricted, two-year grant of $100,000.

Allen Bard, a professor of chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, was announced as the winner of the 2019 King Faisal International Prize in Science. The major international award, which comes with $200,000 and a gold medal from the King Faisal Foundation, is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions in physics, chemistry, biology or mathematics through original scientific research that brings "major benefits to humanity."

A nearly $7 million grant from NASA is supporting research to develop approaches to detecting extraterrestrial life, and two University of Texas at Austin faculty are part of the interdisciplinary scientific team.