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.

The majority of the clinical population served at the UT Speech and Hearing Center is Spanish-speaking, yet there is no audiology-specific training for students providing care. This program provides targeted training for audiology graduate students to best serve their Spanish-speaking patients. The culmination of this experience results in a digital badge provided by the Moody College of Communication, which can be viewed here.

This video project was designed to be shown in all Signature Courses at UT. Together with a discussion prompt, the video aims to acquaint students with mental and physical health resources on campus, and to teach them strategies for success.

“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.

"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.

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.

PTF Shelly Rodriguez co-presented a round table session at the Association of Science Teacher Education International Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana in January 2024. The conference welcomes over 500 Association members and students each year, and includes dozens of papers, poster sessions, round tables, plenary sessions, and interactive workshops.

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. 

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."

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.

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.

To learn more about the Rigorously Compassionate initiative at UT Austin, which focuses on combining empathy with academic excellence, visit their website:
Rigorously Compassionate Program

As part of Steve Finkelstein's PTF Initiative, a campus-wide faculty learning community constructed a canvas sandbox website where they could share materials related to climate change, with annotations, with the broader UT community. They collected the group's materials, and then tried to organize them in a useful way. The materials include lectures, activities, quizzes, projects, pre/post tests, etc., and are organized both by learning objective and by course. The website is now live, and a publication on pre/post survey results is being prepared.

In 2024, I piloted a new web-based version of Astronomy 301 (Introductory to Astronomy), and taught it a second time in 2025. I attempted to include best practices for active learning, which was a challenge in this environment.

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.

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

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.

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.

Blog post detailing discussions and insights from student-faculty conversations at the close of the first full semester of implementation of the "Rigorously Compassionate Syllabi" project.

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.

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 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.