STEMx Celebrates 2025 Pathways Awardees
August 25, 2025 • by
Kristin Patterson
Awards range from creating a chemistry hub to expanding access to product design resources.
The Office of STEM Education Excellence is pleased to announce the third cohort of Pathways Grant awardees. Twelve Pathways Fellows will be funded to work on seven projects over the next two years. Please join us in congratulating the following awardees.
- Gail Chovan & Jessica Ciarla (Textiles and Apparel) will expand Hello Maker Studio (the CNS makerspace) by adding product design tools and creating training modules to increase access to these tools for all UT students.
- David Laude (Chemistry) will lead a collaborative effort to unify lecture and lab resources in the general chemistry sequence, incorporating a validated test bank, career-readiness support materials, and a student-facing learning hub.
- Sharon Herzka & Rivka Eisner (Marine Science) will partner with Rosemary Candelario (Theatre & Dance) to develop a transdisciplinary course and corresponding teaching toolkit on addressing coastal challenges, incorporating perspectives from researchers, local community groups, and artists.
- Anita Latham, Ruth Buskirk (Molecular Biosciences) and Elizabeth Labate (Advising and Student Services) will organize a faculty-advisor community to identify shared goals, discuss relevant challenges, and develop strategies to better align and improve undergraduate experiences.
- Tom Devitt (Integrative Biology) will pilot field-based activities designed to overcome logistical and financial hurdles to hands-on research experiences and explore how future courses could incorporate similar activities.
- Lauren Mitchell (Chemistry) will integrate green chemistry learning objectives into curricula by building instructional materials and documenting sustainable practices used across the department to support the implementation of green chemistry labs.
- Sally Ragsdale (Statistics and Data Science) will embed universal design principles and modern datasets into the introductory statistics curriculum and build additional resources to support learning statistics based on student feedback and insights gleaned from a prior Pathways Exploration and Assessment grant.
