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.

Dr. Chen presented PTF project insights on the topic of internships at the following venue: 

Chen, W. (2024). U.S.-China AI Race and Global Professionals. Panel on GPT Asia, Texas Global, UT Austin.

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.

3 different PTF projects presented:

Loescher project focuses on: Elevate excellence in the classroom through new strategies to understand, measure, and improve rigor in all courses 

•each class is designed and delivered with the expectation of students learning at high levels •each student demonstrates learning at high levels 

•each student is supported so they can learn at high levels

View the poster here

Dr. Chen presented PTF project insights on the topic of internships at the following venue: 

Chen, W. (2024). Publishing in the Interdisciplinary fields. Invited Talk at the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of North Texas at Dallas.

For more information about the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program at UT Austin, visit the program's webpage: DNP Program at UT Austin

"Musings in Greek Literature" is a podcast co-produced by Prof. Deborah Beck and advanced UT undergraduate students of ancient Greek.

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.

“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.

View the presentation slides here

For more information, you can access the article with the DOI: 10.1109/ProComm61427.2024.00034.

Dr. Berkin Dortdivanlioglu and I (Krishna Kumar) received a grant from the Cockrell School of Engineering to use AI for persoanlized tutors in our introduction to programming course. We have since built a personalized tutor for this course and is available for student privately. We are in the process of making the tutor public through TACC

Chen, W. et al., (2023). Bridging the Internship Gap: Preliminary Findings from the Internship Project. Paper presented at Media Sociology Postconference, International Communication Association, Toronto.

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. 

This invited paper is part of a group of six articles on "rupture and repair" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic published in Transactions of the American Philological Association, the journal of the professional organization for American Classicists.

https://doi.org/10.1353/apa.2023.a913465

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.

Team-Based Learning is a specific interactive educational method that has been shown to develop skills for meaningful teamwork. Through engaging classroom activities, students experience the benefits of working with others. According to the literature, students perceive the benefits of teamwork including understanding the course material more deeply and producing higher quality class assignments.

This profile of "Musings in Greek Literature" appeared in the Spring 2023 edition of Life and Letters, the magazine of the UT College of Liberal Arts. This article explores the podcast and its origins, which occurred spontaneously in a conversation with Adam Rabinowitz about experiential learning. At the time, Adam was a PTF, but I wasn't. I re-applied multiple times to the PTF program and was ultimately selected for this podcast project in large part because of Adam's support and encouragement.

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.

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.

"Measuring Impactful Teaching Practices" was presented at the International Virtual Exchange Conference, December 2022, Spain. We explore Global Virtual Exchange (or GVE) at the University of Texas at Austin in the last academic year, 2021-2022 to measure the impact of the faculty-led program,   Our main takeaway was that professors and students participating in the GVE program find the greatest benefits to be in the intercultural student-to-student exchange and the exposure to different perspectives.