PTF Impacts

On April 30, 2025, Guyot hosted a public poster session showcasing student projects focusing on datasets from the City of Austin Open Data Portal, held at the University of Texas at Austin. Projects ranged widely in focus, from environmental data to transportation and public safety, demonstrating the breadth of student inquiry and analysis.

At the end of each semester, about 10 students volunteer to present their findings to the City of Austin employees during one of their regular data meetups.

Dr. Accosta, Dr. Castleberry, and Dr. Davis presented a poster at a national conference describing the Pharmacy Practice Lab (PPL) sequence spanning all six semesters of the UTCOP didactic program to consolidate lab components and increase skills development while aligning with and reinforcing curriculum balance.

Rodriguez, S.R. & Wilson, R. (2024, January) Faculty-driven Communities of Practice: Implications for inclusive mentoring. Round table presented at The Association of Science Teacher Education Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA.

View this proposal from July 2023

Many of the final projects are available online:

https://hipstas.github.io/annotating-adler/

https://hipstas.github.io/gea-psychic-spirituality-recordings/

https://makaylabaughman.github.io/the-leigh-hunt-hair-book/

https://utancientamericas.omeka.net/ 

Two presentations about promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects.

The first presentation was made with the collaboration of a former student/current UGCA at an event organized by Open Austin, which addresses local social and civic challenges through creative uses of technology.

The second presentation was made at the weekly statistics seminar at Texas State University with mostly professors in attendance.

As part of their PTF initiative's goal of creating protocols and resources to better streamline the creation and regular updating of course materials, Nico Osier created this Trauma-Informed Course Auditing Checklist in Airtable to streamline the process of ensuring their lectures and course materials are responsive to research-backed best practices in trauma-informed teaching. Osier's Auditing Checklist was designed with Nursing and Health Sciences courses in mind, but can be adapted for instructors in virtually any field.

As part of their PTF initiative's goal of creating protocols and resources to better streamline the creation and regular updating of course materials, Osier created this Stock Images Database in Airtable to collect sources of free, online images featuring a broader spectrum of body types, skin colors, and other key elements which are vital to medical education.

As part of their PTF initiative's goal of creating protocols and resources to better streamline the creation and regular updating of course materials, Osier created this Bitmoji Database to keep track of the icons they use throughout their course materials and slides to create consistency and systematize their creation and editing processes. This Database can be used as a template for other instructors who are interested in using Bitmoji or other icons and symbols in their course materials, and once copied can be easily edited to fit the individual instructor's needs.

Dr. Jason Heppler of George Mason University reviewed ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool developed by Erika Bsumek, in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of American History. According to an excerpt from the review:

Life and Letters, the print and digital magazine of the UT College of Liberal Arts, featured ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool developed by Erika Bsumek's PTF initiative, in their November 2023 issue.

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

This year’s Teaching Tips  were written by Chair-Elect Jessica Toste, from the Department of Special Education.

Nico Osier presented about the Stock Images Database developed as part of their PTF Initiative at the 2022 Open Education Conference. Themed Rise to Action, the conference took place on October 17-20, 2022 and was completely virtual. Osier presentation titled "Creation and Use of a Stock Images Database to Make Lectures More Diverse and Inclusive" and also featured several student researchers. 

PTF Vernita Gordon was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant on April 1, 2022 as principal investigator. The research objective of the grant is to develop a predictive framework for understanding how bacteria use proteins in their cell envelopes to sense and respond to the mechanics of the surface to which they attach.

The Kendra Scott Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute (KS WELI) held the inaugural Female Founder Pitch Competition in October 2021.

Vernita Gordon presented a paper at the 2021 March Meeting of the American Physical Society, an international-scope conference for physics scholars .... The paper was part of a session titled "Physics Education at All Stages,"

Vernita Gordon was a featured presenter at the UT Austin Physics Departmental Colloquium series on December 1, 2021. This series of events features physicists from within and outside of the University, and is open to all UT faculty, students, and staff. Gordon presented on her PTF Initiative, "Being Human in Physics."

Dr. Lindsey Passenger Wieck, faculty at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, reviewed ClioVis for the pedagogy blog Pedagogy Playground: Innovative Teaching in Higher Education in February 2020. The review discusses her experiences with ClioVis during and after a workshop led by Bsumek, and goes on to highlight the features of the tool which she finds most compelling: interactivity, collaboration, ease of use, exportability, and applications outside of coursework. 

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

In September 2020 History faculty Adam Clulow interviewed Erika Bsumek for Not Even Past, the digital magazine of the UT Department of History, to discuss the development, use, and impacts of ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool created as part of Bsumek's PTF Initiative. This article is part of a wider series that explored how teachers and students across the History department, the university and world more generally responded in new ways to the unprecedented classroom environment faced in a time of global pandemic. 

On October 25-26, 2020, Rice University hosted the Grow PoLS Virtual Workshop: Growing Equity, Inclusion and Diversity for the Physics of Living Systems. The purpose of this PoLS (Physics of Living Systems) workshop was to grow the ecosystem of physics by recognizing the systemic barriers that exist in STEM fields at all education and career levels, by building alliances, and by sharing best practices to overcome these systemic barriers.