Changing the World (May-June 2012)

what your investment in ut makes possible

DRIVEN TO SUCCEED A major investment in data-driven science speeds up discoveries on the Forty Acres

may/june 2012

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changing the world What your investment in UT makes possible

Contents DATA-DRIVEN SCIENCE TAKES OFF UT’s supercomputers are mining vast amounts of information

Cover: UT’s “Stallion” is the world’s highest-resolution

tiled display.

Above: Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell is flanked

by President Bill Powers and McCombs School Dean Tom Gilligan. Dell, Inc., is one of UT’s most generous corporate partners.

COUPLE’S GIFT WILL CREATE UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES CHAIR $1.5 million commitment will fund an endowment for the dean

HOW HAS DELL ENHANCED THE UNIVERSITY? The company’s impact is felt all over campus — and far beyond

UT TAKES THE PRIZE, COURTESY OF GRATEFUL DONORS Two individuals say thanks by sharing their winnings reprinted from may/june 2012

changing the world What your investment in UT makes possible

Driven to Succeed Above: When working

with large amounts of data, sometimes a single screen isn’t enough. “Stallion” is the world’s highest-resolution tiled display, made up of 75 Dell 30-inch monitors, for a total resolution of 307 megapixels. By the end of June, Stallion will be refreshed with new hardware and five additional screens, bringing its total resolution to 327 megapixels.

Center, from top: TACC

Director Jay Boisseau; O’Donnell Foundation President Peter O’Donnell; Alison Preston of the Center for Learning and Memory

credits: Above: TACC except

O’Donnell photo, from Texas Exes archives; Opposite: Carter family photo and Marsha Miller

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How a major new investment is helping speed up UT’s scientific discoveries

T

exans are accustomed to being characterized as

“ driven .” B ut

“data-driven”? Not so much. That may change now that UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has received a $10 million commitment from the O’Donnell Foundation to advance data-driven

science. The grant benefits research with exciting potential in departments and labs all over campus.

Data-driven science is a new mode of computational science emerging alongside modeling and simulation. Vast amounts of data are being collected by new generations of digital instruments—gene sequencers, electron microscopes, satellite-based imagers, you name it—and are increasingly being mined for scientific insights.

“Having large amounts of accurate data enables us to make inferences, correlations, and even predictions,” says TACC director Jay Boisseau,

MA ’90, PhD ’96, Life Member. “Collecting digital data is increasingly cheap and easy. We need digital infrastructure that helps people manage it and make sense of it.”

TACC, one of the world’s leading supercomputing centers, is applying the new funds to enhance its data infrastructure, an approach that should sustain and broaden UT’s leadership in advanced computing and computational science, especially in the Institute for Computational Engineering

and Sciences (ICES). Peter O’Donnell, president of the Dallas-based O’Donnell Foundation and one of UT’s most prolific donors, is an enthusiastic supporter of Boisseau and his staff. “TACC’s new data infrastructure will speed up discoveries in critical areas, including cell biology, imaging, astronomy, and nano-engineering,” O’Donnell says.

“Under Jay’s leadership, TACC has become a strong value creator for Texas.”

President Bill Powers says O’Donnell’s investment could result in some dramatic breakthroughs. “For decades, Peter O’Donnell has been quietly but generously investing in UT,” he says. “We’re once more humbled by his generosity and impressed by his expansive vision of Texas as a world leader in science and technology. The importance of UT’s advanced computing capabilities, embodied by TACC, will only increase over time. As advanced computing enables more sophisticated research across all of the sciences, an investment of this kind is among the most strategic any philanthropist or granting institution could make. It also has the significant side benefit of attracting even more faculty talent to Texas.”

Novel data-driven projects that will benefit from TACC’s enhanced capabilities include a pioneering study of consumer energy usage behaviors at Austin’s Pecan Street Inc., as well as the iPlant Collaborative, a $50 million National Science Foundation-funded effort to improve food yields and produce more-effective biofuels. TACC will also be a vital resource for astronomy professor Karl Gebhardt and his team in their quest to understand the accelerated expansion of the universe. As part of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment, they will observe more than a million galaxies over three years, yielding the largest map of the universe ever produced.

In the inner space realm, Alison Preston, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Section of Neurobiology, is using functional brain imaging techniques to better understand how memory works. The data-intensive infrastructure at TACC will enable Preston and her lab technicians to increase the speed at which they “An investment of this kind is analyze the complex patterns of brain responses among the most strategic any and how they relate to behavior. “ We collect philanthropist could make.” thousands of brain pictures from one individual — UT President Bill Powers participant, and each picture contains thousands of three-dimensional pixels,” Preston says. “The resources available at TACC make it much easier to mine this rich data and increase our ability to answer important questions about memory quickly.”

The O’Donnell Foundation has already contributed $6 million of the commitment and will provide the rest over the next two years.

And UT will kick in an additional $2 million over five years to hire new technology professionals to support and accelerate research that leverages the data resources. It seems a new age of data-driven science in Texas has begun.

Couple’s Gift will create chair for Dean of undergraduate studies

T

om and Jeanie Carter tied the knot as UT students, and now they’ve made a commitment of another sort to their alma mater. Tom, BBA ’74, MBA ’76, and Jeanie, BA ’74, have pledged $1.5 million to benefit the School of Undergraduate Studies. The bequest will create the Thomas L. and Eugenia G. Carter Chair in Undergraduate Studies, which will be held by the school’s dean. Endowed chairs, the highest level of endowment at UT, are key to recruiting and retaining outstanding faculty leaders, and President Bill Powers has stressed the need for more chairs to be competitive for top scholars.

Tom Car ter, who ser ves on the University Development Board, is chairman and CEO of Black Stone Minerals Co. in Houston. “We graduated from the University, and we wanted to give back in a way that best supports the people who make UT the great place it is,” he says. “It was also important to us to invest in an area of great priority for President Powers. We believe, and know the president agrees with us on this, that the ability to retain top faculty has a huge impact on the student experience.”

The School of Undergraduate Studies, established based on recommendations of the Commission of 125, promotes the success of undergraduates by offering strategic advising services and providing a strong first-year experience. The initial home for students who choose not to select another college or school, the school admitted its first class of 800 undeclared students in fall 2009. Thanks to the Carters, says current dean Paul Woodruff, the school “will have a permanent endowment for the dean, which will promote Top: Jeanie and Tom excellence across the Carter in the 1970s board in teaching, advising, and counseling students. Bottom: Paul Woodruff, The Carters have done a dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies wonderful thing.” s e p t e m b e r | o c t o b e r 2011

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changing the world What your investment in UT makes possible

HOW HAS DELL ENHANCED UT? The answer can be found around campus and far beyond

Above: The Dell Social Innovation Challenge, based in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to problem-solving college teams from around the world.

Above right, from top:

Every child at UT Elementary has access to a Dell laptop; Michael Dell is flanked by President Bill Powers and McCombs School Dean Tom Gilligan; TACC’s Lonestar 4 supercomputer is equipped with Dell servers.

Opposite: Zach Anner

Credits: Above, clockwise

from left: LBJ School, UT Elementary, McCombs School, TACC; Opposite: Andrew Martina

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B

ig things happen when companies invest in

T he U niversity

of Texas at Austin. For proof just look at Dell, Inc., which is working with UT to change lives in Central Texas and in the far corners of the world.

Through the years, Dell, Inc., has given almost $22 million to the University. That’s not including the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, which in 2006 gave $50 million to help build the Dell Pediatric Research Institute and the stateof-the-art complex now rising along Speedway as the new home for the Department of Computer Science. In 2011 alone, the company gave $14.8 million in funds, goods, and services to many areas of the University, including UT Elementary School, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the McCombs School of Business.

At UT Elementary School, East Austin students use Dell computers to gain the computer

literacy they will need to succeed in the world.

The award-winning research-based demonstration school has benefited greatly from its longterm partnership with Dell to bridge the digital divide, infuse technology into everyday learning, and build the science, technology, engineering, and math skills of today’s students. To bring this vision to life, Dell has launched a signature program, Dell YouthConnect. With the support of Dell, every student in every classroom has access to laptop computers, an opportunity children might not have at home. In addition to their classroom activities, students work with Dell equipment and volunteers in an after-school digital storytelling project.

With Dell as a technology partner, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is enabling discoveries that advance science and society through the application of highperformance computing technologies. In 2009, Professor Lauren Meyers, director of UT’s Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation, used TACC’s Lonestar 3 supercomputer (a TACC/Dell collaboration) to predict how the emergent strain of H1N1 flu was spreading and to determine the best intervention strategies in a project supporting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. More recently, after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, researchers used the updated Dell/ Intel-powered Lonestar 4 to help calculate and visualize the size and progression of the seismic waves from that event as they passed through the earth’s crust.

In 2011 alone, Dell, Inc., gave the University $14.8 million in funds, goods, and services.

Meanwhile, student projects started as part of the Dell Social Innovation Challenge in the LBJ School of Public Affairs provided power to more than 150 Indian villages and led to more than a hundred girls being educated in a Kenyan slum. The Dell Challenge invites college students to propose projects aimed at solving a particular social problem and then rewards the best proposals with funding to implement solutions. Via this unique form of entrepreneurship, students dedicated to changing the world change themselves along the way through their participation. In addition to the Indian and Kenyan projects, students have supported more than 4,000 HIV-affected families in Rwanda and employed more than 300 people in other developing countries.

Finally, Dell’s partnership with the McCombs School of Business illustrates the impact a company can have on advancing business education. The company shares its executives’ expertise and thought leadership in finance, information management, marketing, and supply chain management through visiting speakers, class trips to Dell offices, and hands-on practicum projects for students.

It’s no surprise that some of the nation’s most qualified business graduates join the company after their time at McCombs. Dell was the No. 1 employer of UT MBAs in 2010-11. Its investment in McCombs has grown beyond recruiting to become a far-reaching partnership that has played an important role in advancing key initiatives across the school.

GRATEFUL DONORS Share their prizes with UT

A

nyone seeking confirmation that The University of Texas transforms lives need look no further than two recent donations. Each represents a big thank you for a positive UT experience.

You may have seen Zach Anner on television as host of the Oprah Winfrey Network’s “Rollin’ with Zach.” After besting the competition in last year’s “Your OWN Show: Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star,” Anner’s travel series aired over the winter and he received $100,000 to donate as he wished. He gave $33,000 to Texas Student Television (TSTV), where he honed his comedic chops while studying film at the University. The student-run station will use his donation to upgrade equipment.

New York native Anner has cerebral palsy—“the sexiest of the palsies,” he likes to say—and the show followed him and his wheelchair from coast to coast, providing a showcase for his intelligent, disarming brand of humor. He’s now at work on a different show and hopes to eventually complete his degree. “TSTV was truly a place that helped me find my voice and the people I work with today,” he says. “It’s an invaluable resource that doesn’t get a lot of press or recognition, but it gives students hands-on experience unlike anything else at UT or any other film school.”

As for Joe Pallini of Tomball, he didn’t attend the University but has two

children who loved being Longhorns, even while maintaining perfect 4.0 GPAs. Kelly Pallini, BBA ’10, is now a nurse. Michael Pallini, after starting out in chemical engineering, realized he wanted to be a physician and changed his major to biochemistry. He will graduate in May and begin his studies at Baylor College of Medicine in July.

An engineer at General Electric, Joe Pallini received GE’s prestigious Edison Award, which came with $25,000. He chose to spread the prize among the Cockrell School of Engineering, McCombs School of Business, and College of Natural Sciences. “I wanted to thank them for the wonderful education my children received and the way the University has treated my family,” he says. “We’ve been very happy with UT. We enjoyed it tremendously and would do it all over again.”

campaign update giving.utexas.edu/campaign

Donors have funded 532 new scholarships and fellowships since the Campaign for Texas began. Nearly 2,500 students, undergraduate and graduate, have received support from the endowments so far. The current market value of the 532 campaign-funded scholarships and fellowships is $71 million, which is 12% of the market value of UT’s overall 2,552 student support endowments.

As of May 1, alumni and friends had made nearly 865,000 gifts to the campaign, contributing a total of $1.91 billion. More than 770,000 of those gifts were for less than $1,000. The average gift was $98.

Changing the World is produced by the University Development Office. Please send your feedback and suggestions to editor Jamey Smith at jjsmith@austin.utexas.edu.

For more news and information about giving to UT, visit giving.utexas.edu.

s e p t e m b e r | o c t o b e r 2011

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