Students

Imagine playing a racing game like Mario Kart, using only your brain to execute the complex series of turns in a lap.

This is not a video game fantasy, but a real program that engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have created as part of research into brain-computer interfaces to help improve the lives of people with motor disabilities.

When people learn things they should not know, getting them to forget that information can be tough. This is also true of rapidly growing artificial intelligence programs that are trained to think as we do, and it has become a problem as they run into challenges based on the use of copyright-protected material and privacy issues.

To respond to this challenge, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin developed what they say is the first "machine unlearning" method applied to image-based generative AI.

As South by Southwest (SXSW) Pitch returns for its 16th iteration, this year’s finalists include a pair of Texas Engineering-led startups.

MACH Transit and Paradigm Robotics  have each come up with innovative solutions to address some unique needs within different technology sectors.

The University of Texas at Austin was Abhigya Paudyal’s dream university for graduate school in the United States from the moment he earned his bachelor’s degree at home in Nepal.  

Globally renowned and consistently ranked among the top programs in the U.S., it was UT Austin’s commitment to its graduate program in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering (CAEE) that caught his attention. 

For all Texas Engineering graduates, earning their degrees is an experience years in the making. But for Jan Carlos Rubio, it's a journey that started well before he became a student at The University of Texas at Austin. 

2023 Cockrell School of Engineering graduates Hannah Lee and Aditi Merchant are recipients of this year’s Knight-Hennessy Scholarship. Among the most prestigious student awards in higher education, the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship funds graduate studies at Stanford University and provides leadership training, workshops, projects and travel opportunities for its recipients.

Two University of Texas at Austin students have been named recipients of Goldwater scholarships, the preeminent award for undergraduate students who conduct research in the natural sciences, mathematics or engineering.

A transformational investment will ease the financial burden for generations of students beginning their journey as engineers at The University of Texas at Austin. Cockrell School of Engineering alumnus Michael Linford, and his wife, Erika, have created a scholarship endowment to support high-potential Texas Engineering students who are Pell Grant-eligible.

A dozen student and staff-led groups will be part of the first cohort of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Seed Grants from the Cockrell School of Engineering.

This program, which is part of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Equity in Engineering, will support seed grants of $3,000 to $5,000 for DEI-focused projects. While faculty are allowed to participate, students, post-doctoral researchers and staff must be the project leads.

Lockheed Martin is supporting the Texas Rocket Engineering Lab (TREL) at the Cockrell School of Engineering in its years-long endeavor to become the first student-led university team to launch a single-stage, bipropellant rocket to the edge of space.

Earlier this month, the Cockrell School of Engineering, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and the Texas Innovation Center officially kicked off our new space tech entrepreneurial program, Launch Texas. Hundreds of students, faculty, alumni and members of the space tech industry came together in Mulva Auditorium in the Engineering Education and Research Center for the Go For Launch event, which featured alumnus and CEO of Blue Origin Bob Smith, a panel of experts on the future of the space economy and presentations by student founders of space tech startups.

Hundreds of students, faculty and staff members, alumni and friends gathered to celebrate a transformative gift resulting in the naming of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. The department will now be named the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Ambient lighting and ethereal depictions of Greek mythology welcome visitors to Daedalus: The Lost Wings, Texas Theme Park Engineering & Design’s latest pop-up attraction. Teams of UT students enter a room filled with artifacts and puzzles – a tiny Grecian boat, a glowing fountain, a bookcase that doubles as a doorway – with 45 minutes to unlock a pair of Daedalus’s legendary wings. Beneath the puzzles are wires, magnets and structures built by an ambitious group of students from across the Forty Acres.

“The very best undergraduate student with whom I have worked.” “The most excellent student I have encountered in my six years of teaching at UT.” This is just some of the high praise for Aidan Weitzner, this year’s Outstanding Scholar-Leader for the Cockrell School of Engineering. Recognized for her hard work and dedication inside and outside the classroom, Weitzner, a biomedical engineering honors student, graduates with a 4.0 GPA and an MCAT score in the 99th percentile. Her impeccable academic record is complemented by her research activities and leadership experience with the UT Austin Global Health Alliance, Alaska Black Caucus Allies for Change and multiple biomedical engineering lab courses.

Women’s History Month is a time to highlight and celebrate the extraordinary women whose legacies empower women today in the pursuit of their dreams. “It wasn’t always this easy for women to learn STEM and be respected in this field, so I am eternally grateful to the women that paved the way for me to have a career at NASA,” said fourth-year biomedical engineering student Sofia Williams.

Landon Watson, who will graduate with his bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering this spring, discusses his time in the Cockrell School of Engineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, what led him to engineering and to UT Austin specifically, and where he's headed after graduation.

Every once in a while, a young person already so accomplished comes along and makes you wonder aloud “what am I doing with my life?” Siddharth Thakur is one of those young people. Even in the sea of brilliant future engineers at the Cockrell School, the 17-year-old stands out. 

With more students than ever graduating on time, The University of Texas at Austin has been able to expand capacity, admitting its largest-ever incoming class. The university has 9,060 first-time freshmen undergraduates, according to data collected on the 12th class day of this semester. The previous high for the entering first-year class was 8,960 in 2018. Total university enrollment rose 3% over last year from 50,476 to 51,992, which is close to the all-time high of 52,261 set in 2002.

A team of Texas Engineering undergraduate students took a colorful approach to the 2021 Cornell Theme Park Design Competition and won two out of five competition categories, placing second overall. Kendall Duggar, Katie Kahoutek, Olivia Pierce and Scia Verma, all mechanical engineering students and members of the Texas Theme Park Engineering Group, developed everything from the park’s technologies to its master plan and layout.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials (CDCM), a National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), is partnering with Texas State University to establish the Center for Intelligent Materials Assembly. The new center is being developed through an NSF Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) grant.