Academics

Ann Barnett Stern, executive vice president of Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, will receive the Distinguished Alumnus Award for Community Service from the University of Texas School of Law on April 15.

The 63rd annual Honors Day ceremonies recognizing the academic accomplishments of 3,907 students from The University of Texas at Austin will be celebrated at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 16, in the university’s Frank Erwin Center.

An expanded group of donors, impressed by the success of the Subiendo Academy for Rising Leaders program at The University of Texas at Austin last summer, has provided $250,000 in funding to double the number of high school students who can participate during the summer of 2011. Enrollment for the June 12-16 session has been…

High school students who feel they do not fit in are less likely to attend college — particularly girls who are gay or obese — according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has contracted with The University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs to develop a comprehensive metric that measures a teacher’s effect on student achievement under the direction of the school’s Project on Educator Effectiveness and Quality (PEEQ).

The success last summer of a pilot program to train the next generation of Texas leaders to deal with challenges facing the state’s ethnically diverse population has drawn new supporters helping to greatly expand the number of high school students who can be accepted this year into the prestigious Subiendo Academy for Rising Leaders.

Debra Umberson, professor of sociology and affiliate of the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin, has been named editor-in-chief of the American Sociological Association’s Journal of Health and Social Behavior, one of the most prestigious and widely respected scientific journals in the field of sociology.

Gregory J. Vincent, vice president for diversity and community engagement at The University of Texas at Austin, will receive an honorary Prairie View Interscholastic League Coaches Association (PVILCA) Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding work in helping to preserve the history of the organization and its members.

A program at The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering has been recognized by ExxonMobil Corporation and the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) for its efforts to increase the school’s diversity and to retain underrepresented minority students in four-year engineering degree programs.

Peter Ward of the LBJ School of Public Affairs has been named the Outstanding Graduate Adviser and Lisa Moore of the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts has won the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award from the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin.

African American teenagers are significantly more supportive than whites of affirmative action and school desegregation, according to a new psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin.

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, philanthropists Joe and Teresa Long, university Senior Vice President Shirley Bird Perry and Ransom Center Director Tom Staley received Presidential Citations, among the most prestigious honors the university awards, on Friday, Feb. 25, at a dinner hosted by the university’s president, William Powers Jr.