About

The Jackson School of Geosciences
Holland Family Student Center
Holland Family Student Center

The Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin is among the most established and well regarded geoscience programs in the world. The school includes the University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, one of the country’s oldest geoscience departments, and two world-renowned research units, the Institute for Geophysics and the Bureau of Economic Geology. The school is home to the world’s largest academic geoscience communities more than 5,000 alumni, 400 graduate and undergraduate students, 120 tenure track and research faculty members, 110 research staff and postdoctoral scientists and 140 support staff.

The Jackson School is both old and new. It traces its origins to a Department of Geology founded in 1888 but became a separate unit at the level of a college only on September 1, 2005. The school’s formation resulted from one of the most generous gifts in the history of higher education when the late John A. and Katherine G. Jackson bequeathed endowments and assets to the university presently valued at over $300 million.