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AUSTIN — University of Texas at Austin mass communication doctoral candidate Ryan Wallace, 33, of Bastrop, was just weeks away from receiving his Ph.D. when a crash took his life.
Wallace, who died in a crash on Highway 21 Friday, March 22 in Bastrop County, was scheduled to defend his dissertation next week, Monday, April 8.
The dissertation was titled “Changing Climates: Evolving Reporting Practices, Priorities and Audience Perceptions regarding the Human-Nature Relationship.”
The School of Journalism and Media at UT-Austin will proceed with the event in his memory.
“We as the school decided to continue with this defense meeting,” said Iris Chyi, Wallace’s dissertation chair. “We believe this work deserves evaluation and recognition, so we’ll continue with this meeting. This is going to be an open defense, so his peers and colleagues can all attend to honor his work that day.”
The event will begin with the dissertation defense at 9 a.m. and the committee will announce a decision at around 9:45 a.m. Students, family and friends will then have the next hour to share their memories of Wallace.
Wallace and 5-year-old Ulises Rodriguez Montoya died in a crash that resulted from Jerry Hernandez, 42, veering his cement truck into a Hays Consolidated Independent School District school bus that was returning from a field trip.
After the cement truck hit the Hays CISD bus, Wallace’s 2024 Hyundai struck the overturned bus.
He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Wallace’s family described him as having “one of the brightest minds and most shining personalities” in any room he was in.
“He had plans to graduate from UT Austin this May and was excited for his next chapter of taking care of himself and reaping some benefits from all of his efforts,” a statement from the Wallace family reads. “His life was cut short in an instant, and it breaks our hearts to know the world will no longer be blessed by his being.”
According to Chyi, Wallace’s dissertation was a 200-page report that dived into how climate change is communicated in the media.
Chyi said Wallace carried out two surveys to help form his findings. The first survey involved 1,000 news consumers around the county, while the second survey gathered information from more than 600 science journalists.
She said Wal lace wanted to improve the gap in communication between how the audience perceived climate change in the news versus how journalists perceive climate change in the news, including what sources are used to cover the topics.
“I’m grateful to have had this privilege to work with him during the past year to help him reach this finish line,” Chyi said. “But no one could have imagined that something like this would happen before this meeting.”
Chyi thinks Wallace’s dissertation could be a “huge contribution to the field,” but now the focus is to find ways to bring his work into the general public.
She said that she heard some of Wallace’s classmates from the same cohort talk about one day picking up his work and trying to get it published in academic journals.
“From there, some media exposure and some publicity (would be needed) to get his findings out,” Chyi said. “Apparently, this is a crisis that needs more attention and this dissertation is actually a timely contribution to the goal.”
With the help from Kathleen McElroy, a UT-Austin journalism professor, Wallace developed a multimedia reporting course for non-journalism majors called “Science and the News.”
The course remains in place today.
