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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.

As the year draws to a close, we're looking back on highlights of 2019, including the arrival and hiring of dozens of new tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the College of Natural Sciences. Below are some of the stellar scientists and mathematicians new to our college community.

Melissa Kemp, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, studies how extinction, biological diversification and colonization are shaped by environmental upheavals. She joined the faculty as a new hire in 2018, and this fall was announced as the winner of the Environmental Science Institute's Billy Carr Distinguished Teaching Fellowship.

Over most of the past 40 million years, having a larger brain relative to body size was an advantage for carnivores, increasing the probability that large-brained species survive while other species go extinct, according to a new study from a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

Over the years, scientists have recorded same-sex sexual behavior in more than 1,500 animal species, from snow geese to common toads. And for just as long evolutionary biologists studying these behaviors have grappled with what has come to be known as a "Darwinian paradox": How can these behaviors be so persistent when they offer no opportunity to produce offspring?

Each year the College of Natural Sciences invites its faculty, staff and students to submit the most stunning and inspiring images from their scholarly research for our Visualizing Science competition. We ask for images that not only inform and educate, but also celebrate the beauty inherent within scientific discovery.

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.

Bar-headed geese have long been an interest of researchers for their unique ability to survive in a variety of altitudes in their annual migration patterns. In the span of 8 to 12 hours, bar-headed geese experience an elevation change of over 26,000 feet as they travel from the Himalayas to the Tibetan highlands in China and Mongolia.

Two graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin, Albina Khasanova and Emily Raulerson, received fellowships from the Department of Energy to carry out research in one of 12 DOE national laboratories.

The American Physical Society recognized Claus Wilke, University of Texas at Austin professor and chair of the Department of Integrative Biology, as a 2019 Fellow in September. Fellowships are awarded based on outstanding contributions to the field of physics, and are received by no more than one half of one percent of the society's members each year.