Academics

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.

Latina/o students’ math and reading Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test scores improve when urban schools increase operating expenditures, decrease student-teacher ratios and increase the number of bilingual certified teachers, says a recent study from The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education.

Cockrell School of Engineering Professor Alan Bovik has been awarded the highest technical honor collaboratively given by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (ISandT) and SPIE, two of the largest academic and industrial societies in the world.

Christian Rabeling (Ph.D. 2010), an alumnus of the graduate program in Ecology, Evolution and Human Behavior at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a Junior Fellowship from the Harvard Society of Fellows beginning in July 2011.

The University of Texas at Austin has selected U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, philanthropists Joe and Teresa Long, university Senior Vice President Shirley Bird Perry and Ransom Center Director Tom Staley to receive the prestigious Presidential Citation for 2010.

The Texas Center for Education Policy (TCEP) will host its annual state conference, “Leading the Nation: A Texas Retrospective on Educational Reform” on Feb. 9 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Austin Hilton downtown.

Robert M. Metcalfe, Internet pioneer and newly appointed professor of innovation at The University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering, will present “Enernet: Internet Lessons for Solving Energy” on Jan. 20 from 4-5 p.m. in the Avaya Auditorium of the ACES building (room 2.302).

Event: Inaugural Forum on Productivity in Public Education, hosted by The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Public School Initiatives and the newly formed Institute for Productivity in Education.

Tom Edgar, professor of chemical engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, accepted the F. J. and Dorothy Van Antwerpen Award for Service from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) recently at the association’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.