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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Dr. Jason Heppler of George Mason University reviewed ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool developed by Erika Bsumek, in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of American History. According to an excerpt from the review:

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.

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. 

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 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.

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 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.

Vernita Gordon presented a paper at the 2021 March Meeting of the American Physical Society, an international-scope conference for physics scholars .... The paper was part of a session titled "Physics Education at All Stages,"

Vernita Gordon was a featured presenter at the UT Austin Physics Departmental Colloquium series on December 1, 2021. This series of events features physicists from within and outside of the University, and is open to all UT faculty, students, and staff. Gordon presented on her PTF Initiative, "Being Human in Physics."

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

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. 

On October 25-26, 2020, Rice University hosted the Grow PoLS Virtual Workshop: Growing Equity, Inclusion and Diversity for the Physics of Living Systems. The purpose of this PoLS (Physics of Living Systems) workshop was to grow the ecosystem of physics by recognizing the systemic barriers that exist in STEM fields at all education and career levels, by building alliances, and by sharing best practices to overcome these systemic barriers.

"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. 

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.

D'Arcy Randall gave a virtual presentation about the pilot program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the College Composition and Communication Regional Conference at the University of Southern California on Dec. 19, 2020.

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. 

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.