Focusing on five areas of research, Texas State continues to meet the requirements in order to become an R1 research institution.
R1 institutions are defined by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as institutions having high research activity, spending at least $50 million annually and graduating 70 doctoral students a year for three consecutive years. Texas State is set to achieve R1 status by 2027.
Vice President for Research Shreekanth Mandayam said Texas State intentionally selected the five main research areas to reinvest in the university: semiconductors, artificial intelligence, aging and dementia, digital humanities, and water and the environment.
“We chose these five areas based on that ambition to be able to recruit people from outside, across the country, compete for them and bring them to Texas and to Texas State,” Mandayam said.
During the State of Texas Statespeech, Texas State President Kelly Damphousse said 80 new doctoral students are starting in the fall. Additionally, Mandayam said Texas State exceeded $183 million in research expenditures in the fiscal year 2025.
Mandayam said Texas State wants to be known as the water university, especially with experts already at the university, and the state setting aside the Texas Water Fund.
“We have a lot of expertise in everything related to water and the environment, which includes water policy, water purification, dealing with the harmful effects of water, like flooding, sentinel species that depend on water, drought conditions, so water is huge,” Mandayam said.
Edwin Piner, professor and chair of the physics department, co-director for the material application research center, said semiconductors have electrical behavior engineered into devices, creating the heart and soul of all electronics.
“The interest in these [Ultra Wide Bandgap] materials in terms of devices would be in high power and high frequency, but more so high power electronics,” Piner said. “So what does that mean? I guess the example that most people could relate to would be like in an electric vehicle … the way the power is distributed around the vehicle is different from one component to the next.”
Piner said he recently became the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish the CREST Center for UWBG semiconductor device materials, semiconductors that are designed to perform under extreme conditions.
“The [UWBG] are based on the physics of these materials, we’ll have the best power conversion capability … and therefore be able to operate at higher efficiencies and therefore less waste in energy to be able to do hundreds of volts, if not thousands of volts of power conversion in these types of systems,” Piner said.
Texas State was awarded a $7.5 million NSF grant to start the research for UWBG in August 2025. According to Piner, Texas State is still at the beginning stages of developing the materials.
Tahir Ekin, professor in the department of information systems and analytics and director of the Texas State center for analytics and data science, wrote in an email to The Star that AI research strengthens interdisciplinary collaboration, increases access to grants and enhances our national visibility.
“If we do not rigorously study AI—its capabilities, vulnerabilities, biases, and resilience—we risk deploying systems that are powerful but fragile. Research ensures that AI is reliable, ethical, and robust,” Ekin wrote.
Ekin wrote that AI is no longer a niche domain and studying it can influence decision-making systems, organizational processes, cybersecurity, healthcare diagnostics, financial markets, and public policy.
“My research focuses on the resilience and robustness of AI systems—particularly text-centric models—under adversarial conditions,” Ekin wrote. “As AI becomes embedded in organizational and cybersecurity infrastructures, we must understand how these systems behave when attacked or manipulated.”
Ekin said his goal is to ensure AI systems remain reliable in high-stakes environments.
Mandayam stated that aging and dementia research will cover everything from Alzheimer’s prevention to property design to help improve the quality of life as people age.
According to Mandayam, digital humanities is the bridge to all other disciplines, taking digital technology and bringing a deep humanities concept to it to figure out the ethics of it all.
Mandayam said he wants Texas State to reach $300 million in research expenditure, which would allow new scholarships, new equipment in labs for students, and for students to train with state-of-the-art facilities and obtain skills that would better them in the workforce.
