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.

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).

In 2024, many of Dr. Tanya Clement's student researchers created dynamic Digital Humanities projects, and some were able to share those projects with broader academic audiences:

Trent Wintermeier (graduate student), Monica Olivio, and Nati Roman (undergraduates) presented “Listening and Annotating Spirituality in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive” as part of Platforms, Power, and Pedagogy. Computers and Writing Conference. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, in June 2024. 

PTF Jen Ebbeler was interviewed for this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how professors can help their students connect and build relationships in both in-person and virtual classrooms, and explore the impact of student interactions on their learning.

Read the entire article here.

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.

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.

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.

PTF Julia Mickenberg worked with her Graduate Assistant and collaborator, Ricky Shear (Department of English), on a survey of UT liberal arts alumni aiming to find out what alumni valued about their liberal arts degrees and how they felt those degrees limited them. The College of Liberal Arts provided Mickenberg with additional funding in order to broaden the scope of the survey from department-specific alumni to the entire College.

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

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. 

The UT System works with internal and external partners to foster critical literacies in students across the P20 continuum.  UT institutions work to cultivate these literacies in students across traditional and emerging academic disciplines, and through partnerships and programs in PK12 schools, communities, and business and industry across Texas.

ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool created by Erika Bsumek as part of her PTF Initiative, was highlighted in UT Department of History News on May 25, 2020 by Dr. Megan Raby. The article explored the ways that ClioVis and Epoch, an initiative by History faculty Adam Clulow, are being used to create undergraduate research opportunities for UT liberal arts and history students. 

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. 

"ClioVis: Description, Origin, and Uses," a September 2020 article from Not Even Past: the digital magazine of the UT Department of History, was awarded Editor's Choice by the online aggregate Digital Humanities Now. 

Erika Bsumek built the ClioVis digital timelines platform for instructors and students to build interactive digital timelines as part of their coursework or scholarly initiatives. The platform has been used by thousands of students across the US, including throughout the UT System, University of Michigan, Stanford, and others, in both humanities and STEM disciplines, as well as for research initiatives.