Think Big. SMU & Dallas.
Dallas is known for its entrepreneurial spirit and its innovative approaches to the business of living.
This is the city of Southwest Airlines, which invented a whole new style of travel. This is where TI engineers developed the idea of an integrated circuit that would become the microchip and change the way humans live, work and play.
The can-do spirit of Dallas helps fuel SMU's intellectual environment to drive cutting-edge research, with far-reaching benefits for our world. It's one reason why SMU is one of fewer than 100 universities classified as "high research activity" institutions by the Carnegie Foundation.
SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski led a University team that played a critical role in the discovery of a brand-new particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson, an elusive particle that scientists say might help explain the origin of the universe. The experimental physics group at SMU contributed a significant portion of the expertise in the hunt for the Higgs at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, a global scientific collaboration of thousands of scientists, including SMU's high-performance computing system. blog.smu.edu/research
Senior biology and geology major Andrew Lin, a President's Scholar and aspiring physician, is comparing the anatomy of SMU's 17-million-year-old beaked whale specimen with a modern beaked whale fossil at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. smu.edu/dedman
Dallas comes up with solutions that can benefit the world. Recently, students, faculty and members of the North Texas community built the Living Village at SMU, an interactive display and teaching tool for the annual Engineering & Humanity Week. Students lived, cooked and slept in temporary shelters showcasing a variety of shelter technologies to help victims of war and natural disasters and impoverished urban dwellers in the developing world. eandhweek.org
Dallas is a center of health care innovation. SMU biologists Pia Vogel and John Wise in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences are using the computational power of the SMU high-performance supercomputer to screen millions of drug compounds in the hope of finding one that can be developed into a drug that re-enables chemotherapy when cancer recurs and chemotherapy appears no longer effective. blog.smu.edu/research
The Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity makes it possible to lead local efforts with global magnitude, nearly anywhere in the world. For example, the search for solutions to dangerous water quality issues that affect millions of people in impoverished areas is driving an SMU lab group's partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). A team of SMU faculty and students is working in the lab and on the ground in Africa and South Asia to help develop a database that will help UNHCR planners provide safer drinking water in refugee camps in those regions. blog.smu.edu/research
SMU's Geothermal Laboratory is a national resource for the development of clean, green energy from Earth's heat. Thanks to a generous grant from Google.org, SMU geothermal energy experts David Blackwell and Maria Richards recently released research that documents significant geothermal resources across the United States capable of producing more than three million megawatts of green power – 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants today. smu.edu/geothermal