News

The Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine today announced that two marine scientists from the University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute (UTMSI) would receive grants totaling nearly $100,000 to assist in the recovery of scientific research efforts in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

The University of Texas at Austin has named Paul Goldbart the next dean of the College of Natural Sciences. His appointment will begin Aug. 1, and he will hold the Robert E. Boyer Chair in Natural Sciences.

A proposed project to rebuild the Marine Science Institute, which was damaged in Hurricane Harvey, was approved Monday by the University of Texas System Board of Regents. The project will help the institute come back into full operation, according to Marine Science Institute leadership, and it will pay for replacing roofs and mechanical systems, supporting interior and exterior restoration of numerous buildings damaged in the storm, rebuilding a research pier that was destroyed by a drilling ship in the aftermath of the storm and replacing student housing. 

It's been six months since Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Texas coast and the students, faculty and staff of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute (UTMSI) in Port Aransas are still working to pick up the pieces of their lives and get their work back on track.

The Winter Olympics — a fantastic competition that tests the limits of human performance in a variety of sports — bears a close resemblance to some events underway on the Texas Gulf Coast where, at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, researchers are testing the limits of fish. They may not win a gold medal, but the scores in these games can reveal which fish are most likely to succeed in the game of life.

Each spring, over a million fish migrate to a small patch of the Gulf of California to spawn. Now—thanks to new research by Brad Erisman at the University of Texas at Austin's Marine Science Institute and his colleagues published in the journal Biology Letters—we know that the Gulf corvina are the loudest known fish on the planet.

The University of Texas at Austin ranked No. 11 among all U.S. institutions (academic and nonacademic) and No. 10 among U.S. universities for publication of scientific research, according to the latest report from the Nature Index.

A consortium led by The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute (UTMSI) is receiving $4.5 million in the third multi-million-dollar grant since 2012 supporting research on the impact of oil spills and dispersants on the Gulf of Mexico. Coming less than a month after Hurricane Harvey caused significant damage on the UTMSI campus, the announcement was made by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, a $500 million research program funded by British Petroleum in the wake of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill.