Academics

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.

Teachers and administrators at The University of Texas Elementary School have completed a new book titled “Teaching to the Spirit of Every Child: Lessons Learned in Urban Education,” and are ready to disseminate it widely to educators across Texas.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) will receive the inaugural Annette Strauss Institute’s Texas Leadership Award in recognition of her nearly four decades of civic leadership at the state and national level.

Dr. Gregory J. Vincent, vice president for diversity and community engagement at The University of Texas at Austin, has been elected to the board of directors of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), filling a term through 2012.

Abhijat Joshi, an alumnus of the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin and Bollywood’s hottest screenwriter, has been named the Graduate School’s Outstanding Graduate Alumnus for 2011.