Contact Us
Dr. John G. Ekerdt
Associate Dean for Research
512-471-2125
Marie King
Administrative Associate
512-471-2125
Joey S. Walker
Senior Grants and Contracts Specialist
512-471-5450
Reggie W. Crim
Senior Grants and Contracts Specialist
512-471-2890
Interdisciplinary Initiatives
The Cockrell School of Engineering has identified five priority interdisciplinary research areas for resource investment and faculty hiring:
- This research is inspired by major societal challenges that will require significant advances in technology and engineering.
- This research leverages the expertise within the Cockrell School, and engineering faculty will engage with the professional schools of law, business, and public policy to ensure the research is conducted with an understanding of the social, ecomonic, policy, and legal issues.
- Knowledge creation, discovery of technology, and advances in engineering science will be enabled through engineers working closely with scientists, espcially chemistry and electrochemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, computer science in the College of Natural Sciences; life scientists in the School of Pharmacy; and geological scientists in the Jackson School of Geosciences.
- Multi-investigator programs are developing around the interdisciplinary research areas in response to federal funding initiatives and strategic seed funding.
- The Cockrell School is also developing industry alliances that bring the leadership of the engineering faculty together with the technology experts in private sector companies and national laboratories. Go to research collaboration for more information.
Sustainable Energy
Our economic future, quality of life and the environment depend on affordable and sustainable energy.
The Cockrell School of Engineering is a major participant in UT's Energy Institute to lead discovery, innovation, commercialization and education in the energy arena. The Energy Institute focuses on overcoming the "deal breakers" in making the transition to our energy future, and the Cockrell School has many strengths and is providing leadership in this effort.
Engineering Human Health Care
With the crisis in health care, it is clear that new, cost-effective, efficacious technologies are needed to diagnose disease and provide therapeutic benefits to patients with chronic and acute conditions.
Cockrell School of Engineering faculty are collaborating with life scientists and medical scientists at the intersection of biology, medicine and engineering technology. The programs in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurological and eye disease leverage the expertise within the Cockrell School and provide paths for future leadership in advanced diagnostic and imaging methods, advanced biosensor technologies, novel biomaterials and drug delivery devices, advanced modeling methods, biocontrol systems, methods of understanding molecular and cellular processes and informatics.
Manufacturing and Design Innovation
Texas is second only to California in manufacturing jobs and, just like the present energy crisis, there is likely to be a "manufacturing crisis" in the near future.
Product and system design and manufacturing are crucial to wealth creation. The modern global economy has caused many manufacturing operations to move offshore making it difficult to compete in markets for mass manufactured products. Recognizing this is the time to develop leading research programs in manufacturing areas where the United States can maintain a competitive advantage, the Cockrell School is organizing around the themes of mass customization, reliability, managing complex systems and micro and nanomanufacturing. These themes are well aligned with our core expertise in modeling and simulation, small quantity manufacturing and system design.
Sustainable and Secure Infrastructure
As the human population increases and becomes more concentrated in urban areas, economic vitality depends on a resilient constructed infrastructure. Furthermore, with the rapid expansion of telecommunications, commerce, communications, and media, we have grown highly dependent on the resilience and security of computer and communications networks.
Space and Earth Engineering
The strengths of the Cockrell School are in disaster planning and recovery, geophysical exploration and space exploration.
The disaster planning and recovery theme addresses comprehensive approaches to dealing with both natural and anthropogenic disasters by new sensing and monitoring technology, innovations in geospatial data and modeling, short-term and long-term predictions and their uncertainties, and pre-disaster and post-disaster recovery. Recovery from hurricanes, floods or wild fires will be greatly enhanced by low-cost configurable satellites that would be rapidly launched in an emergency.
