Individual Fellow Initiatives

Interprofessional education (IPE) is an essential component of all healthcare training and has a growing role in the UT College of Pharmacy curriculum. Additionally, the use of simulations in IPE can provide students with real-world, real-time scenarios that can help build interpersonal skills and pharmacotherapy knowledge in students.

Within social work curriculum, the topic of disability is either explicitly absent or medicalized.  The lack of a rich understanding of disability as a cultural experience that intersects with other cultural experiences is concerning given our ethical guidelines of cultural competence and equity.  Additionally, not only are students excluded via this omission, but so are faculty, staff, and social workers working in the field.  Approximately a quarter of the population identifies as having a disability, yet our curriculum barely acknowledges their experiences.

The development of increasingly powerful computational resources has made computational competencies new core forms of literacy that should be formed as part of basic education across all STEM fields.

The current proposal envisions developing alternative pedagogical materials for the “Measuring Racial Inequality” course, written in plain language and accessible to students from social sciences/humanities and underserved communities and families.

This project focuses on training Clinical Audiology Doctoral students (AuD) to be clinically certified supervisors upon entering the field post-graduation. According to the American Speech-Hearing Association (ASHA), Texas ranks 48 out of 50 states for the number of clinically certified audiologists who are needed to supervise doctoral students in order for those students to have ASHA-approved hours (https://www.asha.org/siteassets/surveys/audiologist-and-slp-to-populati…).

Our project seeks to revitalize the syllabus document as a tool of inclusion. We are interested in making visible the “hidden curriculum” with which students often struggle. The syllabus language, grading and attendance policies, communication and assignment fulfillment methods, course calendar flexibility, course material formats – these can all contribute to developing personal accountability and investment in community.

CE 357: Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering is a third year required undergraduate course that has traditionally been a challenging course for students due to its abstract nature. The average course rating for   CE 357 is 3.8 in the last twenty years. I have successfully transformed the lecture modules to achieve a significant increase in interest and students’ performance in the course. Although preliminary work looks promising, I want to scientifically evaluate the effectiveness of the course and publish the findings.

Sustainability Studies graduated its first sizeable cohort in 2022, and the program has yet to undergo a comprehensive review. Conversations with students revealed their desire for better access to the professional field of sustainability across the sectors of non-profit, government, and business. This is an area that the current structure of the degree does not adequately address. To address these concerns, I am proposing a three-pronged approach. My first initiative is to build a database of internships across the three sectors mentioned above.

The challenges facing modern engineers are more complex than ever. Current engineering issues such as
algorithmic bias, data security and privacy, and sustainability do not only require technically skilled engineers,
but also engineers who are conscious about structural inequities and biases.

This project focuses on mental health on campus.  Specifically, the mental health and self-regulation challenges that mindfulness practices have been empirically shown to address: anxiety, depression, focus, and procrastination. There is strong empirical support for these benefits emerging around the 8-week mark of regular practice (10-15 minutes per day), which is feasible in the confines of the semester calendar.

Resources related to accessibility at UT-Austin are not centralized in a single location that makes them easy for
students, staff and faculty to find them. As a result, UT community members cannot efficiently access the
resources they need because numerous different departments and units are responsible for them. Thus,

Internships have increasingly become a critical step in the college-to-career transition in the media industries and beyond.

The challenge this project addressed was the enhancement of curriculum at the Steve Hicks School of Social
Work (SHSSW). Social Work is centered in principles from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW)
Code of Ethics which includes a strong and clear commitment to working toward social justice and to dismantle
systemic barriers that keep all people from liberation and wellness. It was hoped that Critical Race theory (CRT)
would enhance our curriculum and provide an additional tool to meet our equity and inclusion mandates to

My initiative will achieve better learning outcomes in undergraduate and graduate students in History and the LBJ School by examining the intersection of history and contemporary policy, specifically its disparate impact on communities of color. Currently, departments, centers, faculty and students work independently of one another and lack valuable opportunities to collaborate. Genuine collaboration has evolved into a rare and difficult concept.

Mentored research defies the traditional higher education approach, which separates research and teaching into distinct activities. Instead, mentored research fully integrates faculty research activities and student learning. In this approach, researchers do not simply carry out their research in isolation with a paid set of PhD-level research assistants. Further, students do not simply learn from in-class lectures or more traditional out-of-classroom experiences, such as study abroad.

For some time now the humanities have been “in crisis,” but the crisis is becoming acute: majors in nearly all humanities fields have been sharply declining, enrollments are down, hiring of tenure-track faculty is down, and, at some colleges and universities across the United States, whole departments are being eliminated. Here at the University of Texas, majors that are growing seem to be ones that promise a literal return on investment (invest money in a degree and get that money back, in the form of a well-paying job upon graduation) or at least suggest an obvious and practical use.

(Project completed 2021) Systems of oppression gain their power from silence. Faculty in the School of Nursing and across the country are not always comfortable engaging in conversations about race and racism, but these discussions are necessary in order to address the disproportionately poor health outcomes experienced by BIPOC. In response to student and faculty concerns, this project seeks to move our school towards an antiracist climate by targeting multiple layers.

The goal of this project is to train the next generation of environmental engineers in computing and statistical techniques to solve big data problems. Current undergraduate students in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering have little to no exposure to computational and statistical methods for data analysis (e.g., big data collected from sensor networks). I proposed to integrate computational techniques in several courses throughout the Environmental Engineering Degree.

The idea for this pilot course grows directly out of departmental and university goals to increase opportunities for Experiential Learning and for new technology exposure in the Humanities; and to involve more undergraduate students in original faculty research.

This project is directed at students with no prior knowledge of computer programming languages. When introducing complex and new skills such as computer programming in a classroom, teachers are often confronted with a lot of worried students and great numbers of very different questions, especially in humanities departments. The lecture setting is not well suited to address the needs of individual students.

While the U.S. is more racially open and culturally diverse than at any other time in its history, intolerance and marginalization—often around issues of race, culture and difference—continue to exist. This is punctuated in university settings where students of color find more access to opportunity, yet encounter socially and intellectually non-inclusive environments. UT-Austin stands at the forefront of concerns around race and equity, most recently with the Fisher decision and the current state lawsuit against UT-Austin regarding race discrimination in admissions.

One of the top concerns from many employers is that college graduates lack the “soft skills” (collaboration, team-based skills)and professionalism they require. Collaboratory students will have the opportunity to master the latest skills in their field and develop “soft skills” like creative problem-solving problem solving and communication to help them thrive over the course of their careers.

Hands-on research experiences for undergraduates offer unique active-learning experiences with real-world questions. These experiences create communities and improve 4-year graduation rates. They may also help create a student body and alumni population that recognize the importance of the research mission of large R1 universities.

This project started out with a simple idea: From my original proposal, we noted that “Current historical timelines are not interactive, nor do they enable students to understand connections between different events. They are good at showing chronology, but are not good at illustrating how specific events are influenced by a whole host of different historical factors.”