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The Department of Geological Sciences is the main academic unit of the Jackson School. Founded in 1888, the Department is one of the oldest, largest, and most prestigious geoscience programs in the world. U.S. News & World Report ranks the Department’s graduate program in the top ten nationally for earth sciences, the only program in Texas with this distinction. The Department also has top ten specialty rankings in geology and geophysics/seismology.
With 58 faculty members, the Department is among the largest and most academically diverse in the world. The Department is home to one of the largest combined graduate and undergraduate enrollments – 687 – of any major geoscience program. We also have nearly 4,800 alumni.
The Department has strong ties to industry due to its large size, prestigious alumni, and geographic proximity to Houston, home to about two-thirds of the country’s professional geologists. Students further benefit from opportunities for employment, research assistantships, and academic credit working with Jackson School scientists at the Bureau of Economic Geology and the Institute for Geophysics.
Research Updates
Gary Kocurek is part of a team that announced evidence from the Mars Curiosity rover of a past freshwater lake that could have sustained life.
Rong Fu has been awarded a $700,000 grant from the Dept. of Energy to improve drought forecasts in the Amazon Rainforest.
When Jay Banner accepted his first faculty position, teaching was just something he had to do so he could do what he really loved—research. In...
Nobody had any idea just how gigantic a pterosaur could be until the spring of 1971. Douglas A. Lawson, MA ’72, was a 22-year-old graduate...
Take the trip of a lifetime in this interactive online feature from the Alcalde magazine. The feature follows dozens of UT Austin geology and petroleum...
