Star pupil

Plano teen wins $70,000 and national acclaim for eye-opening research

Alay Shah, Regeneron talent search winner

Plano teen Alay Shah landed a hefty national award.

Photo courtesy of Regeneron

Dallas-Fort Worth has a bona fide math and science superstar in its universe.

Alay Shah, a 17-year-old senior at Plano West Senior High School, earned seventh place and a $70,000 award in this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search. It’s the country’s oldest science and math competition for high school seniors.

Shah received recognition for development of a diagnostic tool that tracks eye movement to identify neurological disorders that he hopes can become a low-cost alternative to MRIs.

“Alay’s tool tracks pupil movement and gaze with an infrared camera, and uses software he wrote. The data is then analyzed using deep learning algorithms to identify abnormal eye reflexes,” the talent search says in a release. “In clinical tests of patients with Parkinson’s, dementia, multiple sclerosis, and ADHD, Alay found unique eye patterns associated with each condition.”

Shah tells Forbes that when he started the project in ninth grade, he faced criticism about what eye tracking can and cannot do.

“I decided to stick with it because it was something I believed in,” he says. “A lot of times, you’re met with failure, but that one success can completely change everything.”

Shay was one of two Texans to claim a spot in the competition’s top 10.

Sam Christian, a 17-year-old senior at Austin ISD’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy, won 10th place and a $40,000 award.

Christian’s winning research examined data from numerous observatories and a NASA telescope to identify the movement of planets in 69 wide-binary star systems, which are twin star systems spaced as much as a light-year apart.

“He showed that the orbits of these exoplanets align to a great extent with the orbit of their binary system. His findings, when applied to a larger sample, could shed additional light on how planets are formed and evolve,” the Regeneron Science Talent Search says.

Shay and Christian were selected from among 1,760 students who entered, representing 611 high schools in the U.S. and 10 other countries. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and the Society for Science sponsor the Regeneron Science Talent Search.

science education

global ranking news

UT Southwestern declared No. 69 best university globally in new report

UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas is the No. 2 best hospital in Texas, and No. 1 in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Photo courtesy of UT Southwestern

undefined

Dallas' UT Southwestern Medical Center is soaring toward the top of the class worldwide. The Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) has ranked UT Southwestern at No. 69 in the world on its prestigious Global 2000 list for 2026.

UT Southwestern also ranks as the No. 2 university in Texas and No. 34 in the U.S.

Each year, CWUR grades more than 21,000 universities around the world based on four factors without relying on surveys and university data submissions: education (25 percent), employability (25 percent), faculty (10 percent), and research (40 percent). For the 2026 edition, 81 million outcome-based data points were analyzed for the rankings, and the schools that placed at the top made the Global 2000 list.

Here's how CWUR ranked UT Austin's performance across the four categories:

No. 43 – Faculty rank
No. 43 – Education rank
No. 178 – Research rank
Unranked in employability

UT Southwestern often gets ranked as one of the best educational institutions, and it's also one of the best hospitals in Texas.

A total of 313 universities in the U.S. made the cut, and only two other Texas universities earned spots among the top 100: The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University in College Station. UT Austin ranked No. 1 statewide, No. 22 nationally, and No. 35 globally; and Texas A&M ranked No. 3 statewide, No. 44 nationally, and No. 91 globally.

In the past year, U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, and WalletHub, have praised the home of the Longhorns as one of the best universities in America. It's a listmaker's favorite in other global ranking reports, including those that focus on graduate schools. UT has maintained its high-ranking status in these annual rankings even as university leaders face criticism from students for closing and consolidating several programs.

These are the top 10 best universities in the world for 2026, according to CWUR:

Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stanford University
University of Cambridge
University of Oxford
Princeton University
University of Pennsylvania
Columbia University
Yale University
University of Chicago

rankings dallas ut southwestern