The first half of April brings; five Goldwater Scholars to UT, ranking number one in the nation; eight UT students receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships; a distinguished professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology receives more than $1.1 million in grants from the Army Research Office; two research projects selected to receive Engaged Scholarship Incentive Grants for fiscal year 2021; Tickle College of Engineering announces their 2020 Faculty and Staff Awards winners; and an interdisciplinary team from UT and the Firefighters Burn Center developed an app to meet recovery needs of burn center patients.

Intersectionality, a term introduced more than 30 years ago, describes how social categorizations such as race, class, gender, and other social characteristics “intersect” and overlap in the experiences of marginalized groups. In 2015, Patrick Grzanka was looking for a way to bring together researchers on campus who study these intersections—and the Intersectionality Community of Scholars was created.

When the fall semester begins, Garriy Shteynberg, associate professor of psychology, will lead a three-year study to examine how Americans’ social and political attitudes have grown more extreme over the past 20 years.

The project was awarded a $351,339 grant from the National Science Foundation in May and is expected to conclude in 2021.

The research is a collaboration among scientists who hold divergent views about how attitudes grow more extreme. In all, the research team will work together on 12 experiments—discussing every aspect of the study design, execution, and analysis with the goal of reaching a joint understanding of the results.