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.

PTF Layla Guyot gave an invited presentation at the weekly statistics seminar at Texas State University, to an audience of primarily faculty. In her talk Guyot discussed promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects.

On April 11, 2024, three Provost's Teaching Fellows presented at the final session of the "Teaching as Wellbeing" mini-conference series, hosted by the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers in collaboration with UT System faculty developers. The series served as a monthly think tank about the relationship between teaching, learning, and wellbeing for educators and educational developers across UT system.

"Musings in Greek Literature" is a podcast co-produced by Prof. Deborah Beck and advanced UT undergraduate students of ancient Greek. Episodes are available directly from UT's Liberal Arts Information Technology Services and also from Apple and Spotify.

“Bridging Rhetoric and Engineering: Qualitative Results from a Writing Center Program to Improve Engineering Undergraduate Writing,” Proceedings from IEEE ProComm, 2024. Pittsburgh, PA (July 14-17, 2024). I delivered this co-authored conference paper at the IEEE ProComm conference. See the link for the paper.

In Fall 2024, PTF Ruth Shear helped launch the new general chemistry labs, rewritten to include Research Methods material (rebranded "thinking like a scientist"), and taught to 4500 students. This involved a complete overhaul of the CH204 general chemistry lab course, turning it into two classes: CH104M and CH104N. These courses are required for the vast majority of CNS majors as well as all pre-health students. The courses were piloted in Fall 2024 with 400 students, and fully launched in Fall 2025 with over 4500 students.

PTF Layla Guyot presented a session at Open Data Day in March 2024, hosted by the Austin Public Library. This event was part of International Open Data Day, which celebrates open government data with events hosted around the globe. Guyot presented about promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects with her collaborator, former student/current UGCA Dustyn Ransom.

Starting with her Initiative from the inaugural PTF cohort, PTF Emeritus Carol Delville worked with School of Nursing colleagues to transition the Advanced Practice program in Adult Gerontology into a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degree program. Delville describes the transition as making her "legacy dream come true," and says about her time in the PTF program, "I think [it was] one of the greatest opportunities UT has offered me."

Julia Mickenberg authored the introduction and one article in the Fall 2024 issue of Profession, an editorial journal of the Modern Languages Association (MLA). 

Alongside Dr. Berkin Dortdivanlioglu, PTF Krishna Kumar received a grant from the Cockrell School of Engineering to use AI for personalized tutors in their introduction to programming course. They have since built a personalized tutor for this course, which is available for students privately. They are now in the process of making the tutor public through the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

Nine students from PTF Layla Guyot's Elements of Data Science course were selected to virtually present the insights gained during their coursework to the Data, Impact, Visuals, and Exploration (DIVE) meetup organized by the City of Austin.

D'Arcy Randall gave a co-authored presentation about the program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on February 16, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois, themed "Doing Hope in Desperate Times." The presentation was part of a session featuring Writing Centers titled "Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations to Promote Transfer and Self-Efficacy," which was among hundreds of sessions of varied topics, formats, and scholarly approaches for over 1000 attendees. 

PTF Wenhong Chen presented a paper at the International Communication Association 2023 Conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in June 2023.

PTF D'Arcy Randall delivered a co-authored presentation at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 26, 2023.

PTF alum Deborah Beck authored this invited paper as part of a group of six articles on "rupture and repair" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in Transactions of the American Philological Association, the journal of the professional organization for American Classicists. In the article, she explores the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic's social isolation and "New Normal" on faculty peer mentorship and how the landscape of academic mentorship has changed since the onset of the pandemic. 

PTF Krishna Kumar presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Gulf-Southwest Section Annual Conference in March 2023. This paper discusses usage and results of the Murder Mystery-style assignments Kumar has developed as part of his PTF Initiative.

Read the complete paper <here,> or find the abstract below.

This profile of PTF Deborah Beck's PTF Initiative, "Musings in Greek Literature," appeared in the Spring 2023 edition of Life and Letters, the magazine of the UT College of Liberal Arts.

Former PTF chair Stephanie Holmsten published this article in the Journal of Political Science Education in September 2023, which is partially informed by findings and experiences from her PTF initiative.

Find the complete article here, or read a summary below.

Julia Mickenberg co-presented about her PTF Initiative in a session at the Modern Languages Association 2023 Convention on January 6 in San Francisco, California. Her paper, titled Valuing the Liberal Arts, was part of Special Session 61: How the Liberal Arts Work.

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.

"Measuring Impactful Teaching Practices" was presented at the International Virtual Exchange 2022 Conference on October 26-28, 2022, in Valencia, Spain. The paper explored Global Virtual Exchange (or GVE) at the University of Texas at Austin in the previous academic year to measure the impact of the faculty-led program.

Dr. Acosta, Dr. Castleberry, and Dr. Davis presented a poster at the July 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy in Grapevine, Texas. Their poster described 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.

D'Arcy Randall's PTF Initiative created a collaboration between the Cockrell School of Engineering and The University Writing Center to create resources and consultant trainings to better support STEM students in technical writing projects and assignments. As a result of the Initiative's work and findings, a number of STEM-specific UWC resources have been created and/or revised, which can be found on the UWC website.

PTF Maddie Holland created a Canvas page that contains videos, short assignments, and teaching notes for instructors in any discipline who would like to teach their undergraduates how to work together effectively in teams. The videos and assignments are student-facing and come with instructor guides on how to implement them in various classes. Completed video modules as well as supporting assignments can be found on Canvas.