Professor , Department of Curriculum and Instruction , College of Education
, jadair@austin.utexas.edu
Spanish Speaker

Jennifer Keys Adair, PhD is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and the Director of the Agency and Young Children Research Collective at The University of Texas at Austin. A trained cultural anthropologist and former preschool teacher, Using video-cued ethnography, Dr. Adair works with young children, teachers, parents and administrators to understand how racism and white supremacy impact the learning experiences of young children. Dr. Adair focuses on the importance of agency for children's capability expansion as well as ways to locate/measure agency to overcome the overly-controlled schooling environments many children of color experience, even in the early years of school. Dr. Adair is a former Young Scholars Fellow with the Foundation for Child Development and recently completed a major Spencer Foundation study on civic agency in preschool classrooms. Dr. Adair is the author of the book, Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism and Early Learning (The University of Chicago Press, 2021; Awarded the Council on Anthropology and Education 2021 Outstanding Book Award) with Dr. Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove. Dr. Adair has published in numerous journals including Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Young Children, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. She currently serves on multiple, national editorial and advisory boards, and lectures in multiple countries. In addition to academic conferences, Jennifer has spoken at SXSW and Blackademics on why white parents need to talk to their children about racism and white supremacy. Jennifer's work and expertise can be found in a variety of media Washington Post, NPR, New America, Code Switch, Huffington Post, Edweek, The Conversation, Chicago Register and the Migration Policy Institute and NAEYC's recent equity statement.

Media Contact: Acacia Coronado, acacia.coronado@austin.utexas.edu,

Professor , Department of Educational Leadership and Policy , College of Education
+1 512 232 2288, cpbrown@utexas.edu

Christopher is a Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy. He also is a Faculty Fellow with The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. He is also a former preschool, kindergarten, and first grade teacher who worked in Title 1 schools. Dr. Brown's research interests, rooted in qualitative methodologies, emerged from his experiences as a classroom teacher across a range of early childhood contexts. These experiences led him to build a research agenda rooted in the lived experiences of those working in contexts undergoing educational reform. By studying varied education stakeholders, he has sought to advocate for educational policies that seek to foster, sustain, and extend the complex educational, sociocultural, and individual goals and aspirations of children, their families, teachers, and school leaders. Much of his research seeks to understand how policymakers' reforms impact the lived experiences of those working across the varied fields of early education. This work illuminates how early childhood stakeholders in public school settings, including district/school administrators and classroom teachers, make sense of and can respond to policymakers’ reforms that emphasize increased academic achievement, standardization, and accountability while providing limited resources through rigorous and developmentally appropriate learning experiences; such practices seek to support all children through equitable learning experiences so that they can grow as learners and as members of their communities.

Media Contact: Acacia Coronado, acacia.coronado@austin.utexas.edu,

Professor , Department of Curriculum and Instruction , College of Education
+1 512 232 4257, keffrelyn@austin.utexas.edu

Keffrelyn D. Brown (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the Suzanne B. and John L. Adams Endowed Professor of Education and Distinguished University Teaching Professor of Cultural Studies in Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. She is the co-founder and co-director (with Dr. Anthony Brown) of the Center for Innovation in Race, Teaching, and Curriculum. She also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for Women and Gender Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on the sociocultural knowledge of race in teaching and curriculum, critical multicultural teacher education and the educational discourses and intellectual thought related to African Americans and their educational experiences in the U.S. Keffrelyn has published over 50 books, journal articles, book chapters and other educational texts. She serves on the editorial boards for several well-recognized peer-reviewed journals including Teachers College Record, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Teaching and Teacher Education and Urban Education. Her most recent book, After the "At-Risk" Label: Reorienting Risk in Educational Policy and Practice was published by Teachers College Press. Keffrelyn has received recognition for both her research and teaching. In 2017 she received the Division K Mid-career Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In 2013 she was awarded the Kappa Delta Pi/Division K Early Career Research Award from AERA. She is also the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the Wisconsin-Spencer Foundation Research Training Grant. In 2012 she received the Regent's Outstanding Teaching award, the highest teaching honor given for excellence in undergraduate teaching across the University of Texas system. She was inducted in the Provost's Teaching Fellows program at UT-Austin in 2017 and in its Academy of Distinguished Teaching in 2019. Keffrelyn is a sought after presenter in her local, regional and national communities. She is active in the multiple roles she has as a researcher, teacher, teacher educator and critically engaged community member. As a former elementary and middle school teacher, school administrator, and curriculum developer, Keffrelyn is keen to the everyday challenges of schooling.

Media Contact: Acacia Coronado, acacia.coronado@austin.utexas.edu,

Director, Population Research Center , Department of Human Development and Family Sciences , College of Natural Sciences
, liz.gershoff@austin.utexas.edu

Gershoff explores how neighborhoods, schools, early childhood education settings, and public policies affect children and youths, focusing on how socioeconomic resources and exposure to violence influence them. More specifically, Gershoff’s current research interests center on four topics: (1) how parental discipline affects child and youth development; (2) how contexts of poverty, neighborhoods, schools, and cultures affect children, youth, and families; (3) how exposure to various forms of violence (from parents, communities, and terrorism) affect child and youth development; and (4) how enriched early childhood educational environments can improve the lives of low income children and their families. Dr. Gershoff is committed to using advanced applications of structural equation modeling and hierarchical modeling to understand the dynamic and multilayered contexts of children’s lives.

Media Contact: Christine Sinatra, christine.sinatra@austin.utexas.edu, 512-471-4641

Associate Professor , Department of Curriculum and Instruction , College of Education
+1 512 232 4145, joanh@austin.utexas.edu

Dr. Hughes has twenty-four years of teaching and research experience in the K-12 educational technology space. Her research and teaching focuses on teacher learning and technology integration in preservice teacher settings and PK-12 schools. She studies how teachers and K-12 students use technologies in-and-outside the classroom for subject area learning and how school leaders support classroom technology integration. She also explores the preparation of new teachers (in university certification programs) to determine how and what they are being prepared to do with technology in their future teaching positions. Her publications have been cited more than 3400 times. Her twenty-four years working in the educational technology field began as an elementary and middle school computer teacher in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s.

Media Contact: Acacia Coronado, acacia.coronado@austin.utexas.edu,

Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs , Extended Education Ventures
+1 512 232 4645, markman@austin.utexas.edu

Arthur Markman's research interests include similarity and analogy, categorization, decision making and consumer behavior, and knowledge representation. Dr. Markman is the founding director of Human Dimensions of Organizations (HDO) at the University of Texas at Austin. HDO is a program that aims to provide education in the humanities and the social and behavioral sciences to people in business, nonprofits, government, and the military. The goal of the program is to teach leaders about how people, groups, and cultures influence the workplace. He is also the director of Similarity and Cognition Lab. He has written numerous articles on his research areas. He was awarded a number of awards including grants to support his research such as the 2007 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to continue this research. He is currently the executive editor of the journal Cognitive Science. The journal is published by the Cognitive Science Society.

Professor , Department of Special Education , College of Education
+1 512 475 6556, srpowell@utexas.edu

Sarah R. Powell is a Professor in the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin and Associate Director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk. Her research, teaching, and service focus on mathematics, particularly for students who experience mathematics differently. Powell is currently Principal Investigator (PI) of an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) efficacy grant (RAAMPS) related to word-problem solving at Grade 4. Powell is also PI of SPIRAL, an IES grant which works collaboratively with Grade 4 and 5 teachers who provide mathematics instruction to students with mathematics difficulty. Powell is Co-PI of STAIR 2.0 (funded by IES) in which the team works with middle school special education math teachers and SCALE (funded by the US Department of Education) in which the team is replicating a fraction intervention in Grades 4-8. Powell collaborates on Math Words, an IES development grant about mathematics vocabulary. She also assists with a word-problem project funded as a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to Querium. To help create the next generation of researchers focused on mathematics, Powell is PI of a doctoral leadership grant (LIME) funded by Office of Special Education Programs. Powell was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2019. Powell understands all of these efforts are a team effort, and she thanks her project leads, graduate students, research assistants, and research collaborators as well as the teachers and students who participate in these projects.

Media Contact: Acacia Coronado, acacia.coronado@austin.utexas.edu,

Associate Dean for Student Success, Community Engagement, and Administration , College of Education
+1 512 232 7519, +1 512 471 7551, vsaenz@austin.utexas.edu
Spanish Speaker

Victor B. Sáenz serves as the Associate Dean for Student Success, Community Engagement, and Administration in the College of Education and as the L. D. Haskew Centennial Professor in Public School Administration in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds courtesy appointments with the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, the Irma Rangel Public Policy Institute, the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis, and the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute. Sáenz's current work advances research-informed best practices and policy solutions that improve educational outcomes for underserved students in education, with a special emphasis on boys and young men of color. In 2010 Sáenz co-founded an award-winning initiative at UT-Austin, a multi-pronged effort focused on advancing educational outcomes for male students of color. Under Project MALES he launched a nationally recognized Student Mentoring Program that partners with local schools to connect undergraduate peer mentors with middle school and high school male students. He also co-created a network of K-12 and higher education institutions called the Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color that focuses on advancing educational outcomes for this critical student population. Supported by grants from the Greater Texas Foundation (GTF), the Trellis Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation, this statewide collaborative focuses on improving educational outcomes for male students of color across the state of Texas. The Consortium is made up of over thirty institutional partners in K-12 and higher education, and it seeks to align and coordinate existing programs and services across the education continuum.

Media Contact: Acacia Coronado, acacia.coronado@austin.utexas.edu,

Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology and Director of the Office of Academic Technology
+1 512 232 1772, julie.schell@austin.utexas.edu

Dr. Julie Schell is the Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology and the Director of the,Office of Academic Technology at The University of Texas at Austin. She oversees the University's technology-enhanced learning ecosystem and works to advance teaching and learning through the strategic use of academic technology. She is also an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Departments of Design and Educational Leadership and Policy, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on learning experience design. In her current studios, Dr. Schell and her students are partnering with generative AI to prototype speculative objects and environments designed to improve teaching and learning in education settings.  Dr. Schell is also an award-winning college teaching and learning expert with over 25 years of expertise in higher education. She has delivered over 100 talks, workshops, and keynotes on teaching and learning. She is the creator of Think Before You Design Think­?, a popular introductory human-centered design curriculum she first launched at AT&T and has delivered at Fortune 500 companies and non-profit organizations throughout the United States. Dr. Schell's approach to design thinking focuses on using the principles of learning science to develop design thinking self-efficacy, especially among non-designers. She has supported thousands of new learners in their journey to understand and apply human-centered design to improve lived experiences. Before joining the Provost's office, Dr. Schell served as the Assistant Dean of Instructional Continuity and Innovation at the College of Fine Arts, where she led the transition to online learning for over 200 arts and design faculty and academic staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Media Contact: Casey Maute, casey.maute@austin.utexas.edu,

Associate Professor , Department of Special Education , College of Education
+1 512 475 6551, jrtoste@austin.utexas.edu

Jessica R. Toste is an Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin. She holds research affiliations with the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk and Texas Center for Equity Promotion; and is a fellow with the IES-funded Research Institute for Implementation Science in Education (RIISE). Her research is focused on methods for intensifying intervention for students with persistent reading challenges and reading disabilities, and she is principal investigator on research grants from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Toste was trained in reading intervention research as a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University and as a Fulbright scholar at the Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University. She has worked as an elementary special education teacher and reading specialist in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Dr. Toste is associate editor for the Journal of Learning Disabilities and a principal member of the reading, writing, and language development grant review panel for the Institute of Education Sciences. She is an award-winning teacher; she was the recipient of a 2023 President's Associates Graduate Teaching Excellence Award, 2022 Dean's Distinguished Teaching Award, and was named one of the 2017 "Texas 10" professors at UT Austin. She is current Chair of the Graduate Assembly and Immediate Past Chair of the Provost's Teaching Fellows Program at UT Austin, as well as current President of CEC's Division for Learning Disabilities, and Vice-President for CEC's Division for Research. Dr. Toste is engaged in advocacy as a member of the Board of Directors for GLSEN, a leading national organization focused on LGBTQ+ issues in K-12 education, and as Past Chair of the Board of Directors for Disability Rights Texas, the federally designated legal protection and advocacy agency for people with disabilities in Texas.

Media Contact: Acacia Coronado, acacia.coronado@austin.utexas.edu,

Professor , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 537 8112, paulvonhippel@utexas.edu

Paul von Hippel?s research interests include educational inequality and the relationship between schooling, health, and obesity. He is currently working on a WT Grant-funded study on the growth of achievement gaps, as well as a study, funded by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, on financial inequality between families and between school districts. He was a co-investigator on a state-funded project that evaluated the teacher preparation programs in Texas, and he now serves as a research advisor to a multisite randomized study evaluating the impact of summer learning programs. He is a three-time winner of best article awards from the education and methodology sections of the American Sociological Association. Von Hippel is an expert on research design and on statistical methods for missing data. Before his academic career, he was a data scientist who developed fraud-detection scores for banks including JP Morgan Chase and the Bank of America.

Media Contact: Paul Corliss, paul.corliss@austin.utexas.edu,

Professor , Department of Psychology , College of Liberal Arts
, yeagerds@austin.utexas.edu

Prior to his research career, David Yeager was a middle school teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In his substantive area of research, he studies adolescent development, with a focus on aggression, stress, and academic achievement. His approach is to conduct longitudinal, randomized field experiments at key transitions (e.g., the transition to high school or college) to investigate the role of social cognitive processes in shaping adolescents' developmental trajectories. This is because he believes that one good way to understand a developmental system is to try to change it. In addition, he draws on qualitative and correlational methodologies to examine developmental phenomena. In his current research, he is investigating the psychological causes of A) adolescents' reactions to peer exclusion or victimization, and B) changes in academic performance among racial minority adolescents at the transition to high school or college. This research has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Child Development, Developmental Psychology, JEP:General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Educational Psychologist, Review of Educational Research, the Journal of Adolescent Research, and other outlets. In his methodological research, he investigates the psychology of asking and answering questions, so as to optimize the accuracy of self-reports. In addition, he evaluates the accuracy of methods for sampling survey respondents (e.g., random samples and non-probability samples of Internet volunteers). His methodological research has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Public Opinion Quarterly, Developmental Psychology, and Medical Care

Media Contact: Daniel Oppenheimer, oppenheimer@utexas.edu, 512-475-9712

M. K. Hage Centennial Professor in Education , Counseling Psychology , Department of Educational Psychology , College of Education
+1 512 471 0364, +1 512 471 4407, rainslie@austin.utexas.edu

Ricardo Ainslie explores the intersection of psychology and culture through such topics as the psychological experience of immigration, ethnic conflicts within communities, and the relationship between individual and collective identity. He pursues these topics primarily through the descriptive methodology of qualitative inquiry. Additionally, Ainslie examines these matters through books, documentary films, and photographic exhibits. Drawing from the fields of anthropology, creative non-fiction, and the liberal arts, Ainslie has generated a hybrid methodology of 'psychoanalytic ethnography' based on in-depth interviews of profoundly psychological character. His extensive work in Texas and Mexico propelled his inquiry into how communities function and transform in response to significant conflict. Ainslie is particularly interested in investigating how individuals and broader cultural groups experience life within these affected communities. Ainslie's multidisciplinary and integrative sensibility is evident in his extensive involvement throughout the University of Texas at Austin, where he is professionally affiliated with the American Studies Program, the Center for Mexican American Studies, and the Lozano-Long Institute for Latin American Studies. He is the M. K. Hage Centennial Professor in Education, was recently a Fellow in the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and taught at Houston's Center for Psychoanalytic Studies for seven years.

Media Contact: Acacia Coronado, acacia.coronado@austin.utexas.edu,

Associate Dean for Global Engagement , School of Social Work
, nbusch@austin.utexas.edu

Noel Busch-Armendariz, Ph.D., is a professor at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and director of the Institute on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault, a collaboration between the Schools of Social Work, Nursing and Law. Her research focuses on interpersonal violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, refugees, and international social work. She has over two decades of experience in working to end violence against women and their children, and has worked as a battered women's advocate, support group leader, program director, and registered lobbyist. She has served as an expert witness in nearly four dozen criminal, civil, and immigration cases involving domestic violence and sexual assault, and co-directs a national training on how to be an ethical and effective expert witness.

Media Contact: J.D. Moore, jordan.moore@austin.utexas.edu, 512-471-1458

Clinical Associate Professor , Department of Finance , Red McCombs School of Business
+1 512 232 6821, butlerjc@mccombs.utexas.edu

John Sibley Butler is the director of the Herb Kelleher Entrepreneurship Center, and director of the IC2 Institute, which focuses on technology commercialization and is dedicated to the creation of new ventures throughout the world. He is an author, researcher and lecturer on venture start-up, immigrant and minority entrepreneurship and organizational behavior. Prof. Butler has consulted for many firms, such as State Farm Insurance Co., as well for the U.S. Military. He is also a member of the Economic Advisory Team of Governor George Bush's 2000 Presidential Campaign. His books include "Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black America: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics;" "All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way" (with Charles C. Moskos -- Winner of the Washington Monthly Best Book Award); and "Immigrant and Minority Entrepreneurship: The Continuous Rebirth of American Communities" (with George Kozmetsky). Butler has appeared on over 30 radio and television programs, including Eye On America (CBS Nightly News), The Jim Leher News Hour, CBS Radio Talk Show, The Osgood Report, and Public Radio. His research has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, and other newspapers and magazines across America. Butler received his undergraduate education from Louisiana State University and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

Media Contact: Judie Kinonen, judie.kinonen@mccombs.utexas.edu,

Clinical Professor , School of Law
+1 512 232 7796, dgilman@law.utexas.edu

Gilman can address immigration law, immigrant rights and family detention.

Media Contact: Wendy Schneider, wschneider@law.utexas.edu,

Professor , Department of Government , College of Liberal Arts
+1 512 471 1343, dleal@austin.utexas.edu

David Leal's primary academic interest is Latino politics, and his work explores the political and policy implications of demographic change in the United States. He studies questions involving Latino voting patterns, Latino public opinion, the role of religion in politics, the politics of migration and the border, and the military and society.

Media Contact: Daniel Oppenheimer, oppenheimer@utexas.edu, 512-475-9712

Professor , School of Law
+1 512 232 1367, jdzienkowski@law.utexas.edu

John S. Dzienkowski ’83 joined the Texas Law faculty in 1988. He teaches and writes on professional responsibility, real property, international energy transactions, and oil and gas taxation. 

Media Contact: Wendy Schneider, wschneider@law.utexas.edu,

Professor , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 471 4697, +1 512 471 5057, rai@austin.utexas.edu

Varun Rai is a professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, where he directs the Energy Systems Transformation Research Group, and in the Mechanical Engineering department. His interdisciplinary research at the interface of energy systems, behavioral sciences, complex systems and public policy focuses on enabling a broad diffusion of sustainable energy technologies globally. Dr. Rai has published numerous journal articles, including in Applied Energy, Energy Policy, Energy Research & Social Science, Environmental Research Letters, Global Environmental Change, Nature Climate Change and PLOS ONE.

Media Contact: Paul Corliss, paul.corliss@austin.utexas.edu,

Professor , School of Law
+1 512 232 1369, david.spence@mccombs.utexas.edu

David Spence is Rex G. Baker Centennial Chair in Natural Resources Law at the University of Texas School of Law, and teaches Business Government & Society at the McCombs School of Business.  Professor Spence’s research focuses on the law and politics of energy regulation, broadly defined. His scholarly writings address both the economic regulation and environmental regulation of the energy industry (both the fossil fuel and clean energy sectors).

Media Contact: Wendy Schneider, wschneider@law.utexas.edu,

John J. McKetta Centennial Energy Chair, Professor , Mechanical Engineering , Cockrell School of Engineering
+1 512 475 6867, webber@mail.utexas.edu

Dr. Michael E. Webber is the Sid Richardson Chair in the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the John J. McKetta Centennial Energy Chair in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to his role as a faculty member, from August 2021 to September 2024, Webber served as CTO of Energy Impact Partners, a $5 billion venture fund focused on investments in cleantech and climate tech startups with the potential for deep decarbonization at speed and scale. Webber’s works spans research and education at the convergence of engineering, policy, and commercialization on topics related to innovation, energy, and the environment. 

Media Contact: Nat Levy, nat.levy@utexas.edu, 512-471-2129

Professor , Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
+1 512 232 1626, werth@utexas.edu

Dr. Charles J. Werth is a Professor & Bettie Margaret Smith Chair of Environmental Health Engineering in the Department of Civil, Architecture, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Werth’s research and teaching focus on the fate and transport of pollutants in the environment, the development of innovative catalytic technologies for drinking water treatment, and the mitigation of environmental impacts associated with energy production and generation. 

Professor , Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
+1 512 232 6409, +1 512 232 7826, bayrak@mail.utexas.edu

Oguzhan Bayrak is a distinguished teaching professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and holder of the Cockrell Family Chair in Engineering #20.  His research and teaching interests are related to the behavior, analysis and design of reinforced and prestressed concrete structures, bridge engineering, evaluation of structures in distress, structural repair, and evaluation of aging effects.

Professor , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 471 8959, +1 512 471 8972, eaton@austin.utexas.edu

David J. Eaton received his Ph.D. in environmental engineering and geography from Johns Hopkins University. He teaches courses on systems analysis, environmental and energy policy and nonprofit management at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Dr. Eaton's current research concerns U.S.-Mexico environmental cooperation, new methods for evaluation of air pollution emissions, joint management by Palestinians and Israelis of shared groundwater, and water conservation in Texas. 

Media Contact: Paul Corliss, paul.corliss@austin.utexas.edu,

Professor , Department of Computer Science , College of Natural Sciences
+1 512 471 9796, pstone@cs.utexas.edu

Peter Stone is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group (LARG) within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, as well as associate department chair and Director of Texas Robotics. He was a co-founder of Cogitai, Inc. and is now Executive Director of Sony AI America.

His main research interest in AI is understanding how we can best create complete intelligent agents. He considers adaptation, interaction, and embodiment to be essential capabilities of such agents. He focuses mainly on machine learning, multiagent systems, and robotics. He researches topics that are inspired by challenging real-world problems. His AI applications have included robot soccer, autonomous bidding agents, autonomous vehicles, and human-interactive agents.

Media Contact: Christine Sinatra, christine.sinatra@austin.utexas.edu, 512-471-4641

Professor , Department of Economics , College of Liberal Arts
, ocoibion@austin.utexas.edu

Olivier Coibion works on macroeconomic topics, including monetary policy, how agents for their expectations, inflation measurement, and commodity prices. Prior to joining UT Austin, Olivier worked at the International Monetary Fund, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Brookings Institution. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Media Contact: Daniel Oppenheimer, oppenheimer@utexas.edu, 512-475-9712

Clinical Professor , School of Law
+1 512 232 1210, hway@law.utexas.edu

Heather K. Way directs the Community Development Clinic. Way has been a practitioner in the field of community development and affordable housing law since 1997. Prior to joining the faculty in 2006, she was the founder and Director of Texas Community Building with Attorney Resources, which provides legal education and pro bono legal assistance to nonprofit organizations. Prior to founding Texas C-Bar, Way was a staff attorney at Legal Aid of Central Texas where, as a Skadden Fellow, she represented nonprofit community development corporations and low-income persons seeking to access affordable housing. Way frequently lectures on topics in the area of affordable housing and community development. She is actively involved in the development of public policies related to community development, including land banks, tax delinquent properties, housing preservation, and gentrification. The State Bar of Texas Young Lawyers Association presented Way in 2002 with its Outstanding Young Lawyer of Texas award. Way has also been recognized as the 2001 Outstanding Young Lawyer of Austin (by the Austin Young Lawyers Association) and one of the Top 40 Lawyers Under 40 by the Texas Lawyer. Most recently, she was recognized in 2006 as an outstanding "Houser" by the Texas Low Income Housing Information Services.

Media Contact: Wendy Schneider, wschneider@law.utexas.edu,

Associate Professor , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 232 2561, araa2@utexas.edu

Aiken's research focuses on reproductive health and spans several disciplines, combining backgrounds in biomedical sciences, public policy, demography, public health. Her current projects include: examining women's experiences obtaining safe abortion in contexts where legislative barriers prevent access through the healthcare system; evaluating programs and policies designed to increase access to contraception in the postpartum and post-abortion setting; and investigating the determinants and impacts of unintended pregnancies through a health equity and reproductive justice framework.

Media Contact: Paul Corliss, paul.corliss@austin.utexas.edu,

Professor , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 471 2956, jangel@austin.utexas.edu

Jacqueline L. Angel is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1989 and post-doctoral training at Rutgers in mental health services research and the Pennsylvania State University Program in Demography of Aging. Her research focuses on issues at the intersection of family, health and aging. She is particularly interested in evaluating the impact of policies on the health and well-being of Latinos, immigrants, and other vulnerable groups, and how cultural heterogeneity among the elderly affects the design of programs for the cost-effective delivery of health services. Angel is a co-investigator on an NIH/National Institute on Aging funded benchmark study of the longitudinal health of older Mexican Americans in the Southwestern United States. Since the inception of the project, she has assessed the impact of nativity and the migration process on health outcomes, and examined their implications for family living arrangements and long term care policy. She is currently developing a research agenda that focuses on the role of civil society and non-governmental organizations on the care of low-income elderly in the United States and Latin America.

Media Contact: Paul Corliss, paul.corliss@austin.utexas.edu,

Associate Professor , Department of Economics , College of Liberal Arts
+1 512 475 8704, mike.geruso@utexas.edu

Michael Geruso’s research focuses on developing country health and the regulation of US health insurance markets. In his work on Medicare, he has used publicly available and large-scale administrative datasets to investigate upcoding by physicians and imperfect competition among private Medicare Advantage insurers. His research on sanitation provides the first evidence that that open defecation, practiced by a billion people worldwide, generates large infant mortality externalities. His work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, and the Economist magazine. His research has been funded by the National Institutes for Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Media Contact: Daniel Oppenheimer, oppenheimer@utexas.edu, 512-475-9712

Director of the Center for Health Communication , Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations , Moody College of Communication
+1 512 348 8490, mackert@utexas.edu

Michael Mackert, Ph.D., is the Director of The University of Texas at Austin Center for Health Communication and Professor in the School of Advertising & Public Relations and Department of Population Health. His research focuses primarily on the strategies that can be used in traditional and new digital media to provide effective health communication to audiences with low health literacy. He leads projects on a variety of public health issues – including tobacco cessation, opioid overdose prevention, and men's role in prenatal health – that generate evidence-based health communication strategies and contribute to health communication scholarship.

Media Contact: Kathleen Mabley, kmabley@austin.utexas.edu, 512-232-1417

Director of Research for the Texas Politics Project , College of Liberal Arts
+1 512 471 0371, joshmblank@austin.utexas.edu

Joshua Blank is the Research Director of the Texas Politics Project, where he has conducted public opinion polling of Texans for over a decade. Blank has extensive experience polling Texas voters about their attitudes towards abortion, gun control/gun violence, voting/elections, and many other areas of public interest. He regularly writes, presents, and gives interviews about contemporary Texas politics, including elections, public opinion, and governance. Born in New York, NY, he has a bachelor's degree in political science from Boston University and a doctoral degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin.

Media Contact: Daniel Oppenheimer, oppenheimer@utexas.edu, 512-475-9712

Dean, School of Law , School of Law
+1 512 232 1120, rchesney@law.utexas.edu

Bobby Chesney is a national security law specialist, with a particular interest in problems associated with terrorism. Professor Chesney recently served in the Justice Department in connection with the Detainee Policy Task Force created by Executive Order 13493. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security, a senior editor for the Journal of National Security Law & Policy, an associate member of the Intelligence Science Board, a non-resident fellow of the Brookings Institute, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the American Law Institute. He holds a TS/SCI clearance. Professor Chesney has published extensively on topics ranging from detention and prosecution in the counterterrorism context to the states secrets privilege (testifying in Congress last year regarding the latter topic). He has served previously as chair of the Section on National Security Law of the Association of American Law Schools and as editor of the National Security Law Report (published by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security). His upcoming projects include a book (under contract with Oxford University Press) concerning the evolving judicial role in national security affairs. Professor Chesney's scholarship is posted on SSRN here. He also maintains a BePress Selected Works page here, though it is not as current as the SSRN page. For a complete list of his publications including works-in-progress, please see his CV (posted in the left-side column of this page). For those interested in following national security law developments, Professor Chesney welcomes subscriptions to his listserv, which focuses exclusively on distributing news of recent judicial opinions, new statutes, forthcoming scholarship, and other similar resources relating to national security and the law. Just send him an email if you'd like to subscribe. The course website for Professor Chesney's Con Law class is posted here. For National Security Law, click here. For Law and Terrorism, click here. Finally, to get the syllabus for the special one-week mini-course on terrorism and law, click here

Media Contact: Wendy Schneider, wschneider@law.utexas.edu,

Professor of Practice , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 471 8324, +1 512 656 6592, srgreenberg@austin.utexas.edu

Sherri Greenberg served for 10 years as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, completing her final term in January 2001. In 1999, she was appointed by the Speaker of the House to chair the House Pensions and Investments Committee, which oversees the Texas State Employee Retirement System, state employee health insurance program, Teacher Retirement System, local public employee retirement systems, and regulation of state investments and public securities. After the 1999 legislative session, the Speaker appointed her as chair of the Select Committee on Teacher Health Insurance. Greenberg served two terms on the House Appropriations Committee, which is the House's budget writing committee, and served on the Appropriations Committee's Education and Major Information Systems Subcommittees. Other committee assignments included the House Economic Development Committee and the Welfare-to-Work Committee. Greenberg's professional background is in public finance. She served as the Manager of Capital Finance for the City of Austin from 1985 to 1989, overseeing the City's debt management, capital budgeting, and capital improvement programs. Prior to that she worked as a Public Finance Officer for Standard & Poor's Corporation in New York, where she analyzed and assigned bond ratings to public projects across the country. Greenberg has a B.A. in Government from UT Austin and an M.S. in Public Administration and Policy from the London School of Economics. At the LBJ School she teaches courses in public financial management, policy development, and public administration and management. Her teaching and research interests include public finance and budgeting, Texas state government, local government, health care, education, utilities, transportation, and campaigns and elections.

Media Contact: Paul Corliss, paul.corliss@austin.utexas.edu,

Executive Director of Texas Politics Project , College of Liberal Arts
+1 512 471 0090, j.henson@austin.utexas.edu

James Henson teaches in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is the founder and executive director of the Texas Politics Project and the director of the political internship program. The Texas Politics Project is a hub of research and public affairs work focused on providing non-partisan resources for understanding Texas government and politics. As part of that work, he co-founded the longest running academic survey of public opinion in Texas with Daron Shaw in 2008. Results from more than a decade of statewide polling for that project are available to the public on the Texas Politics Project website. His writing about Texas politics has appeared in every major Texas media outlet, as well as a variety of publications including The Washington Post, The Hill, Texas Monthly, The Texas Tribune, and others. He is the principal author of the Texas Politics textbook published by Soomo Learning and used in introductory Texas government courses across the state, which is now in its 11th edition.

Media Contact: Daniel Oppenheimer, oppenheimer@utexas.edu, 512-475-9712

Professor , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 475 7241, peniel.joseph@austin.utexas.edu

Joseph’s research focuses has been on “Black Power Studies”, which explore the interdisciplinary fields of Africana studies, women’s and ethnic studies, law and society and political science. He is currently teaching “The Civil Rights Movement and Public Policy”.

Media Contact: Paul Corliss, paul.corliss@austin.utexas.edu,

Professor , Department of Government , College of Liberal Arts
+1 512 232 7275, dshaw@austin.utexas.edu

Daron R. Shaw is Distinguished Teaching Professor and Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Chair of State Politics at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Shaw specializes in American Government, Campaigns and Elections, Political Parties, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior, and Applied Survey Research. He is author of The Race to 270: The Electoral College and Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004 (Chicago), co-author of Unconventional Wisdom: Facts and Myths about American Voters (Oxford), co-author of The Turnout Myth (Oxford), co-author of The Appearance of Corruption (Oxford) and co-author of Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era (Oxford). His research has been published in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior, Political Communication, PS: Political Science, Party Politics, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and several other professional journals. In addition to his academic career, Professor Shaw served as a strategist in the 1992, 2000 and 2004 presidential election campaigns. He is currently co-director of the Fox News Poll, co-director of the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll, director of the Texas Lyceum Poll, and associate Principle Investigator for the 2024 American National Election Study. He is also a member of the decision team for Fox News, the advisory board for the MIT Election Data & Science Lab, and the advisory board for the Annette Strauss Institute. Formerly, he served as President George W. Bush’s representative on the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and as one of the academic directors for President Barack Obama’s Commission for Election Administration.

Media Contact: Daniel Oppenheimer, oppenheimer@utexas.edu, 512-475-9712

Professor , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 475 7242, suri@austin.utexas.edu

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University's Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Suri's primary research interests include the formation and spread of nation-states, the emergence of modern international relations, the connections between foreign policy and domestic politics, and the rise of knowledge institutions as global actors. Professor Suri is the author and editor of eleven books on politics and foreign policy, most recently: Civil War By Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. His other books include: The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office; Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama; Henry Kissinger and the American Century; and Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. His writings appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Atlantic, Newsweek, Time, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and other media. Professor Suri is a popular public lecturer and comments frequently on radio and television news. His writing and teaching have received numerous prizes, including the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas and the Pro Bene Meritis Award for Contributions to the Liberal Arts. Professor Suri hosts a weekly podcast, “This is Democracy.”

Media Contact: Paul Corliss, paul.corliss@austin.utexas.edu,