Individual Fellow Initiatives
Offering Real-World Opportunities for Students Enrolled in Statistics and Data Science Undergraduate Research
Cohort: 2023
Fellow: Layla Guyot
There is a need for offering data analysis support to our local communities. While many undergraduates
enrolled in our courses have expressed interest in conducting data analysis research projects, our department
doesn’t currently have a systematic way to offer these types of experiences. Thus, the primary goal of this
community-based service project is to provide both experiential learning and research opportunities for
undergraduates while supporting the broader Austin-area. Specifically, this project will coordinate with local
Curiosity to Question: a Multidisciplinary Open-Inquiry Course Focused on Research Design
Cohort: 2016
Fellow: Julia Clarke
Hands-on research experiences for undergraduates offer unique active-learning experiences with real-world questions. These experiences create communities and improve 4-year graduation rates. They may also help create a student body and alumni population that recognize the importance of the research mission of large R1 universities.
The Keys to Understanding History: Unlocking Digital Timelines
Cohort: 2016
Fellow: Erika Bsumek
This project started out with a simple idea: From my original proposal, we noted that “Current historical timelines are not interactive, nor do they enable students to understand connections between different events. They are good at showing chronology, but are not good at illustrating how specific events are influenced by a whole host of different historical factors.”
Bevosourcing: Tools to Involve Students in Citizen Science and Online Data Publication
Cohort: 2015
Fellow: Adam Rabinowitz
Digital archives and the internet have made it possible for non-experts to make major contributions to research through crowdsourcing and citizen science. UT has fascinating and important collections of primary sources for the humanities, many of which have been digitized. But before my PTF project, there were no digital tools at UT to facilitate crowdsourcing as a pedagogical strategy, engaging students with historical documents while enriching the collections themselves. The project therefore proposed to develop two UT-based crowdsourcing platforms.