THE WORLD

what your investment in ut makes possible may/june 2012

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

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DATA-DRIVEN SCIENCE TAKES OFFUT’s supercomputers are mining vast amounts of information

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 DONORSTwo individuals say thanks by sharing their winnings

reprinted from may/june 2012

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.

What your investment in UT makes possible

Contents

ChAnging the world

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changing the worldWhat your investment in UT makes possible

Driven to SucceeDHow a major new investment is helping speed up UT’s scientific discoveries

Texans are accustomed to being characterized as “driven.” but

“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 compu-tational science emerging alongside modeling and simulation. Vast amounts of data are being collected by new generations of digital instru-ments—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 digi-tal 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 supercomput-ing 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

Above: When working with large amounts of data, sometimes a single screen isn’t enough. “Stallion” is the world’s highest-resolu-tion 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 re-freshed 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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and Sciences (ICES). Peter O’Donnell, presi-dent of the Dallas-based O’Donnell Founda-tion 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 dra-matic 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 sci-ences, an investment of this kind is among the most strategic any philanthropist or granting institution could make. It also has the sig-nificant 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-effec-tive 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 analyze the complex pat-terns of brain responses and how they relate to behavior. “ We collect thousands of brain pic-tures from one individual participant, and each pic-ture 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.

“An investment of this kind is

among the most strategic any

philanthropist could make.”

— UT President Bill Powers

couple’S Gift willcreate chairfor Dean of unDerGraDuate StuDieS

Tom and Jeanie Carter tied the knot as UT stu-dents, 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 retain-ing 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 Univers i ty 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 e x c e l l e n c e a c r o s s t h e board in teaching, advising, and counseling students. The Carters have done a wonderful thing.”

top: Jeanie and Tom Carter in the 1970s

Bottom: Paul Woodruff, dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies

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changing the worldWhat your investment in UT makes possible

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

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

how haS DellenhanceD ut?The answer can be found around campus and far beyond

B ig things happen when companies invest in the university

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 includ-ing the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, which in 2006 gave $50 million to help build the Dell Pediatric Research Institute and the state-of-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 Elemen-tary School, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the McCombs School of Business.

At Ut elementary School, East Austin stu-dents use Dell computers to gain the computer

literacy they will need to succeed in the world. The award-winning research-based demonstra-tion school has benefited greatly from its long-term 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 pro-gram, 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.

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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.

With Dell as a technology partner, the texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is enabling discoveries that advance science and society through the application of high-performance computing technologies. In 2009, Professor Lauren Meyers, director of UT’s Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation, used TACC’s Lonestar 3 super-computer (a TACC/Dell collaboration) to pre-dict how the emergent strain of H1N1 flu was spreading and to determine the best interven-tion 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.

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 edu-cated 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 them-selves along the way through their participa-tion. 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, market-ing, 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 partner-ship 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 bio-chemistry. 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 updategiving.utexas.edu/campaign

In 2011 alone, Dell, Inc., gave

the University $14.8 million in

funds, goods, and services.

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.