Three Questions with the President

This year UT surpassed its $1 billion student support fundraising goal as part of the What Starts Here campaign. What excites you most about this achievement?
Our aspiration of becoming the world’s highest-impact public research university depends on attracting the best students, supporting them and equipping them to go out and change the world. That starts with making our world-class University affordable and accessible, and then surrounding our students with the people and programs that enable them to succeed. I could not be more grateful for — or energized by — the generosity of Longhorns taking care of Longhorns to reach this incredible philanthropic milestone. I am thrilled that we reached this goal two full years ahead of our target date. Aid is entirely due to the annual support of donors.

As the vision and priorities for the new UT Medical Center are now coming together, how will UT shape the future of health care?
In addition to Dell Medical School and the soon-to-be-built UT Medical Center, we are incredibly fortunate to have so many complementary disciplines on campus that can work together to create innovative technology-enabled solutions to the most challenging health issues. Whether it is working with Texas Robotics, the Cockrell School of Engineering or the Oden Institute, we are in a unique position to unite life sciences, hard sciences, computational science, data science and engineering to create outside-the-box medical advances and treatments. Technology additionally has the ability to reduce the cost of care and increase accessibility. UT’s breadth and depth in AI, plus the world’s fastest academic supercomputer, are powering new ways to use technology for the benefit of society.

Speaking of AI, you declared 2024 the Year of AI. Why now?
There is a long history of AI on the Forty Acres, going back as far as the 1960s. Our AI expertise has grown exponentially since then, leading to dozens of labs, research centers and initiatives that attract the best experts in the field. We are honored to host the National Science Foundation’s Institute for Machine Learning. We just announced that the largest GPU system in academia, located at our Texas Advanced Computing Center, will be growing even more. This is vital for research, of course, but we want to engage all students, in every discipline. Beyond science and medicine, AI can impact arts and the humanities. AI will become only more impactful on society, and we want UT to continue to lead those developments.