On any given school day, Roopal Dhar grows cancer cells, observes their growth or death and photographs them under a bulky microscope.
Dhar, 25, is in her second year as an international doctoral student and part of a University of Texas at Dallas team studying how inflammation affects cancer progression and treatment resistance.
“It’s never mundane. It’s never boring. Every day, it’s … a new discovery,” Dhar said.
A university investing in innovative research, such as the work Dhar is doing, has a big impact on the future of medicine and businesses while also attracting faculty and students to the area, school officials say. And recruiting more bright students like Dhar, in turn, brings in even more new ideas to develop solutions to pressing societal needs, they say.
That’s why UTD officials want to raise $750 million through the New Dimensions campaign, which aims to expand resources that attract talented students and faculty and to invest in groundbreaking research, arts facilities and programs. The school has raised about $300 million so far. (UTD is a supporter of the Education Lab at The Dallas Morning News.)
At just over 50 years old, the young university has met ambitious goals in establishing itself as a top-tier research school. Now officials say the campaign will help lay the groundwork to bolster UTD’s future growth.
Such investments help UTD associate professor Nikki Delk pursue research and place students in her lab to learn through hands-on experimentation. Over the past eight years, nearly 90 students — including undergraduate, master’s, doctoral and even high school students — have helped Delk with research in biological sciences.
“We have these great students here that work really hard,” Delk, 48, said. “We want to continue to attract the students.”
Before she started her career at the university, Delk weighed various offers. But UTD’s rapid growth and ambitious goals to become a top research university ultimately drew her to the school in 2014.
The founders of Texas Instruments established the school’s foundation when they opened the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in 1961. About eight years later, then-Texas Gov. Preston Smith signed a bill that integrated the campus into the University of Texas System and changed its name to UTD.
In 2016, the university reached the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education’s coveted R1 status, which denotes “very high research activity.”
Two years later, it qualified for money from the National Research University Fund. Texas distributes such funds to “emerging research universities” to further support them as they work toward national prominence.
Eligibility for those funds included having a $400 million endowment annually, awarding at least 200 doctoral degrees each year, having a freshman class with high academic achievement and housing high-quality faculty.
Keeping the school affordable is key to even more growth, officials said.
The school — which is expected to top 31,000 students for the first time once this semester’s enrollment numbers are finalized — already boasts that about two-thirds of its classes graduate with no student debt, compared with 48% of all Texas students and 32% of students nationally.
The university has a variety of scholarships and assistance programs — including the Eugene McDermott Scholars Program, National Merit Scholars Program and Academic Excellence Scholarships — which help students cover most, if not all, expenses associated with a degree.
The campaign aims to increase financial aid resources through new endowed funds, more merit-based and need-based scholarships and fellowships.
Although the university has a strong reputation in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — incorporating more arts into the school will promote even more innovation, UTD president Richard C. Benson said recently. For example, a stronger focus on arts could shape engineering projects as researchers contemplate user-experience design.
“It’s going to be revolutionary,” Benson said of the investments and school developments.
The university broke ground this spring on a $158 million, 12-acre cultural district called the Athenaeum that will include a museum of Asian art, a performing arts center and a museum for “the traditional arts of the Americas.”
This semester, UTD merged two schools to form one larger School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. The move is meant to enhance the student experience, boost research and encourage collaboration among fields that may not intersect often.
Benson boasts three degrees in engineering, but music has always been part of his life. Throughout leadership roles he’s held, the president — who plays the trumpet — has long championed arts initiatives.
“There’s a lot of people at UTD who are not majoring in music or painting,” Benson said. “They’re engineers and scientists … yet they love to play music. They love the arts, and it’s important for them to have this — this venue, this outlet on the campus.”
On a recent summer day, UTD students experimented with animation by incorporating stop-motion techniques with other mediums, such as clay, buttons, beads, charcoal, cutouts and puppets.
Christine Veras, an assistant professor, explores the merging of physical and digital technologies to incorporate multimedia possibilities in animation and encourages her students to push the boundaries of what is possible.
“It’s really exciting to have a university that has that vision for arts and includes arts,” Veras said. “Normally, it’s always a STEM focus and sometimes people don’t value art the way they should.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
