PTF Impacts

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

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."

"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.

“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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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:

Former PTF chair Stephanie Holmsten published this article in the Journal of Political Science Education in September 2023, which is partially informed by findings and experiences from her PTF initiative.

Find the complete article here, or read a summary below.

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. 

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.

PTF alum Deborah Beck authored this invited paper as part of a group of six articles on "rupture and repair" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in Transactions of the American Philological Association, the journal of the professional organization for American Classicists. In the article, she explores the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic's social isolation and "New Normal" on faculty peer mentorship and how the landscape of academic mentorship has changed since the onset of the pandemic. 

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.

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.

"Measuring Impactful Teaching Practices" was presented at the International Virtual Exchange 2022 Conference on October 26-28, 2022, in Valencia, Spain. The paper explored Global Virtual Exchange (or GVE) at the University of Texas at Austin in the previous academic year to measure the impact of the faculty-led program.

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.

Dr. Beck made a guest appearance on the Classics media podcast "Movies We Dig" due to her work with "Musings in Greek Literature." On this podcast, hosted by several young Classicists including two graduates of the UT Classics Ph.D. program, Beck discussed the made-for-TV version of Homer's Odyssey starring Armand Assante and Isabelle Rosselini (1997).  

Former PTF chair Stephanie Holmsten co-presented a session on her global virtual exchange initiative at the American Council on Education virtual conference on March 24-25, 2021. With international collaborators from Ecuador and Venezuela, Holmsten discussed their 2019-20 international collaboration between (US)-ESPOL(Ecuador)-UAM (Venezuela), and provided evidence of the COIL model for course design in achieving student outcomes. Their experiences with icebreakers, collaborative projects, and assessment tools were also shared.

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,"

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

This year’s Teaching Tips were written by Chair-Elect Stephanie Seidel Holmsten, from the International Relations and Global Studies program.

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.