News

CNS Career Services advises students to keep resumés to one page, but Teddy Hsieh deserves two.

Each year, the College of Natural Sciences bestows its highest honors for graduating seniors on a select group of students. These students, known as Dean's Honored Graduates demonstrate excellence across multiple domains, achieving not only academically but in scientific research, independent intellectual pursuits, leadership, service, entrepreneurship and community building. Below are biographies of the 30 outstanding students selected by a committee of College of Natural Sciences faculty for this distinction in 2020.

Students at UT Austin already had plenty on their plates. When COVID-19 hit, the usual return from spring break and settling back into campus life turned instead into a mass migration—students scattering to shelter in place wherever they call home, in many cases moving back in with their families. Some became ill or began caring for sick family members. Classes moved online. Jobs ended. Everything was topsy turvy (it still is). But that hasn't stopped College of Natural Sciences undergraduates in public health, neuroscience and computer science from finding ways to help out their communities and fellow classmates.

Ordinary life in UT Austin's College of Natural Sciences is filled with friendly faces, hands-on discovery, walks under the live oak trees, rigorous classes, and a whole lot of pizza. In our far-from-ordinary spring of 2020, we miss these things and can't wait to get them back.

Since 1951, Texas Parents has proudly honored two undergraduate Outstanding Student recipients and four finalists who demonstrate exceptional leadership, scholarship, character and service. They are awarded $1,000 grant for a registered student organization or campus program of their choice. This year both recipients and two of the finalists were from the College of Natural Sciences. Meet the award winners.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that 43 University of Texas at Austin students, including 14 in the College of Natural Sciences, will receive prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships.

Two University of Texas at Austin seniors, Zoe de Beurs and Cole Maguire, have received Goldwater Scholarships, one of the most prestigious awards for STEM undergraduates.

​The University of Texas at Austin's public-facing programs on campus and at museums, schools and science centers are currently suspended to help slow the spread of the coronavirus, the agent causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

Education is powerful — it's a means to inciting progress in the world, empowering individuals and transforming lives. Education's role in facilitating positive change is a major theme in Texas Computer Science student Dora Gurfinkel's life. She's so aware of it, in fact, that she is using her education to elicit real change within the university while paying homage to her family's unique history.