Strategic
Priority Areas
Strategic priority areas are areas of opportunity where we are investing additional resources to grow and expand the Oden Institute's capabilities. In these areas we are hiring multiple new faculty members, launching new research efforts and Oden Institute centers, launching new educational programs, and establishing new strategic partnerships.
We have expanded our faculty with multiple new hires at the forefront of the foundations of AI for Science, including scientific machine learning. We have also hired multiple new faculty at the forefront of AI's revolution in the physical and life sciences and engineering. Oden Institute faculty are leading multiple national-scale AI for Science and Engineering efforts, including the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins and the Department of Energy Mathematical Multifaceted Integrated Capability Center on Digital Twins.
Computing is revolutionizing medicine and the Oden Institute is at the forefront of creating the new computational science methods and tools that power this revolution, together with the translational and clinical partnerships that will translate research innovation into real-world impact on patients and health care systems worldwide. The Joint Center for Computational Oncology is a unique partnership between the Oden Institute, MD Anderson Cancer Center and TACC that is shaping the future of cancer care. Our faculty strength in Computational Medicine is expanding rapidly, with 2025 seeing our first ever joint hire with the Dell Medical School, first ever joint hire with the Department of Molecular Biology, and the launch of the new Center for Computational Medicine, which will reach beyond Austin as a global resource for the creation of medical digital twins.
Home to the group who led the pioneering research that won the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize, leadership in HPC is interwoven throughout the Oden Institute's research and educational programs. We have an extremely close and synergistic partnership with the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the nation's leading academic supercomputer center. Computing is one of the three pillars of our Computational Science, Engineering and Mathematics PhD program, and we have a culture of pushing the boundaries in computing at scale, evident in our HPC leadership in areas such as quantum materials, geophysics, multiscale modeling, and digital twins.
