How do faculty at one of the world’s leading research universities decide which problems to tackle? How do they shape novel and useful research and make sure it will advance knowledge and improve lives? They learn to think creatively and collaborate - which can be surprisingly challenging - but also highly productive when guided by design methodologies.
For the past seven years, the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship and Creative Endeavors (OVPR) have partnered with the School of Creative Design and Technologies to lead an innovative faculty retreat where strengths are leveraged across disciplines, and "outside the box" research proposals are devised and developed.
The Associate Professor Experimental (APX) retreat is thoughtfully designed to spark unconventional research connections among newly tenured professors across campus. The three-day event is an opportunity for researchers from diverse fields to come together and sketch out possible cross-disciplinary projects that combine their expertise. Each team is eligible for flash funding to kickstart their new research direction, and proposals are pitched to OVPR leadership.
"I was grateful to witness such a high level of rigor,” said Aleksandra Jaeschke, associate professor of architecture and sustainable design and recent APX participant. “It made me reflect a lot on my own work, especially the aspects I cherish and those that could benefit from more focus."
APX retreat participants have gone on to receive external funding from federal, private foundation, and state agency sponsors, further develop their research with other institutions, and are publishing findings in peer-reviewed journals that are examined by the global research community. Student researchers are also gaining valuable experience working on these projects and incorporating them into their thesis work.
"It made me reflect a lot on my own work, especially the aspects I cherish and those that could benefit from more focus." - Aleksandra Jaeschke
APX collaborations have yielded innovations such as:
- autonomous robot and detection system to locate microplastics in the Texas Gulf
- effective hands-on instructional tools for teaching complex concepts to geosciences undergraduates
- method to advance neuroscience research on anxiety using structural health monitoring sensors
- examination of the process for insuring historical landmarks damaged by earthquakes
"Our original goal in creating APX was to foster a scholarly community of practice that values meaningful cross-disciplinary collaboration – where all involved researchers are inspired by the new approaches and topics they learn from interacting with scholars far outside their formal discipline,” said Jennifer Lyon Gardner, UT’s deputy vice president for research and co-founder of APX. “Newly tenured associate professors are UT’s rising research stars. APX brings them together to show them ways to collaborate that will amplify, rather than detract from, the research programs they’ve established for themselves already."
Where to Start: Making the Most of Focused Time
APX participants are tasked with finding a new research direction with colleagues they have never met in a short time frame. But the retreat goes beyond that. It is also about embracing the awkward and the unknown. Administered by a team of design and research development experts from the University, they guide faculty through each step and have a proven system to help them to make the most of this focused time together. Each activity and tool are well-devised, purposeful and assessed annually.
The retreat is facilitated by Julie Schell, the assistant vice provost of academic technology and director of the Office of Academic Technology; Tamie Glass, associate professor, School of Design and Creative Technologies in the College of Fine Arts; Casey Boyle, associate professor, Department of Rhetoric and Writing in the College of Liberal Arts; and Lyon Gardner with the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship and Creative Endeavors.
"Engaging in a new way, developing creative ideas and collaborating are complex concepts and it’s not as easy as it sounds," Schell said. "One of the ways we teach people to make these intellectual leaps is to use evidence-based learning science coupled with established principles of design."
"We help faculty to unlearn, to move beyond ambiguity bias, which is sticking with what we already know because it is more familiar and comfortable than taking a risk to do something where you don’t know what the answer is going to be."
Even though the faculty participants are from different fields of research, they all have one thing in common. They recently succeeded in jumping over a major career hurdle – the multi-year, highly focused effort to achieve tenure. At APX they are asked to become students again.
Schell adds, "It’s not natural for them to think this way. They have spent all this time becoming tenured by concentrating in a very specific area of focus. But over the past seven years of helping to lead the retreat and refining the experience based on analysis and their feedback, I have learned that creativity most definitely can be designed. I think we have seen that over and over throughout APX."
Chemistry and Transportation Engineering: Building a Robot to Locate Microplastics
"The APX retreat piqued my interest in the topic of microplastics and environmental pollution, and the impacts on society," said Carlos Baiz, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, where he studies biological molecules and their structures using methods such as infrared spectroscopy.
Microplastics are extremely small pieces of plastic debris in the environment resulting from the breakdown of consumer products and industrial waste. They’re found in the digestive tracts of marine fauna as well as humans who ingest them via food, especially seafood. They are known risks for cancer development and can cause damage to cells, proteins and DNA.
As part of the 2021 cohort, Baiz paired with Christian Claudel, a transportation engineer in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering who has a background in electrical and computer engineering. His research is focused on various applications of mobile automation and sensing systems from traffic safety to flash flood monitoring.
This year, they began a three-year project funded by the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust. "MIRROR: a Microplastic Raman Optical Rover to Understand Microplastics Variability Along Beaches of Matagorda Peninsula" is designing and developing an autonomous rover for mapping microplastics on the ground and their variability along the beach sediments of the southeastern coast of Texas. The overall goal is to end up with a more concise understanding of microplastic behavior and future measures to lessen the effects of microplastics pollution.
"This project would not have been possible without the initial support of APX, which allowed us to develop a prototype and get preliminary data on the topic," Claudel said. "For me, this program was extremely valuable. Right after tenure, I was in a situation where I did not know where to go next. APX was a fantastic way to interact with people that work in completely different areas of research, and without it, we would have never gotten anything started."
In Claudel’s lab, current activities for the APX project revolve around the robot system. The researchers are figuring out how to optically detect microplastics using the camera located on the robotic arm, which involves development of new machine vision algorithms. A second objective is to precisely control the arm so that it is automatically placed near the infrared detection system developed by the Baiz team.
"APX was a fantastic way to interact with people that work in completely different areas of research, and without it, we would have never gotten anything started." - Christian Claudel
"My research group is developing new methods to classify polymer components in the environment using near-infrared spectroscopy, which we have demonstrated to be effective in ‘detecting’ particles and determining their polymer composition within 0.1 seconds,” Baiz said. “Together, we are implementing this as part of the rover and deploying it in the environment."
In addition to the Matagorda Bay funding, Baiz received additional support from the Texas Gulf Coast Research Center at The University of Texas Marine Science Institute to study microplastic degradation in the environment along with the Professor Zhanfei Liu at the institute.
Geosciences and Special Education: A New Tool for Teaching Evolution Mechanics
Even though APX 2020 was not in-person because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it still forged bonds between two UT researchers with shared interests in educational pedagogy, assessment, and teaching philosophy. Their multi-year collaboration that began at the retreat has resulted in two publications in the Journal of Geoscience Education.
Rowan Martindale, a geosciences associate professor, was eager to talk to North Cooc, an associate professor of special education, after hearing about his work at the beginning of the retreat. Also a core faculty member in the Center for Asian American Studies, Cooc explores how family background, culture, and school contextual factors influence decisions and trajectories within special education.
"After I learned that North is an education specialist, I wanted to talk to him about a reef ecosystems board game I had developed as a learning tool to teach complex geoscience concepts," Martindale said.
Her research is focused on determining how environmental conditions influence the evolution and extinction of marine invertebrate communities. She is also interested in geosciences education and game design, so she created a board game to teach students about evolution mechanics – mutation, migration, and natural selection – as well as ecology and how reefs survive natural disasters. But she needed to see if it really worked and if students walked away with a true understanding of the concepts after playing the game.
"I had some preliminary data that suggested there might be some inequities surrounding game-based education,” she said. “We got to chatting about how he could bring his expertise to help assess the effectiveness of games in science classrooms."
From there, the two associate professors began forming a study to evaluate which conditions facilitate learning and collaboration during game-based geoscience activities. With the help of an undergraduate honors student and a Ph.D. candidate, they collected data on educational gains, cooperative learning elements, and enjoyment of two of Martindale’s board games – "Taphonomy: Dead and Fossilized" and "Reef Survivor" – that were deployed during two-hour geoscience labs.
"My student, who was in her first semester of the special education Ph.D. program, was given an incredible opportunity to get hands-on research experience as a result of the APX retreat," Cooc said. "She observed game activities and rated students’ interactions. The data she collected was a key component that led to publication."
Architecture and Sociology: Preserving History in Earthquake Zones
Preserving historical and architectural heritage is challenging and nuanced, especially in areas prone to seismic risks. During APX, two researchers combined their expertise in architecture and sociology to examine the process of insuring landmarks in Mexico, a country highly vulnerable to earthquakes with many ancient ruins and world heritage sites.
Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla partnered with Daniel Fridman to investigate the socio-technical processes that determine the valuation of cultural heritage and to evaluate Mexico’s natural disaster insurance solutions after two earthquakes hit in 2017, damaging nearly 2,300 religious historical buildings in 11 states. The team analyzed how preservation experts who participated in restoration efforts dealt with the values ascribed to the affected heritage by the communities that use them and the insurance representatives who negotiate claims.
At UT, Fridman studies the intersections of economy and culture, the sociology of money and economic policy in the Department of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts. Ibarra-Sevilla is a faculty member in the School of Architecture where he focuses on ancient masonry techniques, stereotomy, descriptive geometry, adaptive reuse design and the current challenges of historic preservation.
This research team has presented the findings of their funded APX project at annual conferences for academic and professional organizations such as the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, Association for Preservation Technology and the American Sociological Association. Their paper, "Aligning Valuations: Preservation Experts and the Values of Historic Heritage in Post-Disaster Mexico," which includes a Ph.D. student a co-author, is under review for publication.
"The retreat allowed us to creatively develop a research project that expanded our knowledge and interests," Fridman said. "The time limit helped us focus on what both of us found exciting rather than deviating into the difficulties of interdisciplinary work. I now use a similar approach, borrowing from the APX experience, in my graduate seminars."
Structural Engineering and Neuroscience: Using Acoustics Emissions to Enhance Anxiety Studies
Two faculty from the inaugural cohort in 2018 are still going strong with their APX research collaboration. After being awarded funding from the retreat, Salvatore Salamone and Michael Drew further developed their interdisciplinary work, earning a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
This year, Salamone and Drew, now both full professors, published their results in the Ultrasonics journal and are finalizing another manuscript for submission. A provisional patent for the technology they developed is also in the making.
"The APX program provided me with a unique opportunity to leverage my expertise in a field like neuroscience, an area that I wouldn’t have been able to explore otherwise," Salamone said. "This experience allowed me to apply my skills in new and innovative ways, broadening my professional horizons. We also had several students involved in the project, including two Ph.D. students and two postdocs."
At the retreat, it took long time for the then-associate professors to formulate their collaboration – they struggled to find a possible connection given their different disciplines and research interests. Salamone is a structural engineer who is pioneering next-generation technologies and methodologies for the monitoring and protection of civil and aerospace structures while Drew is a neuroscientist who seeks to understand how the brain forms memories of experiences and how memories are retrieved and can be suppressed.
Salamone's engineering projects require implementation of concepts in dynamics and vibrations, wave propagation, digital signal processing, data acquisition systems and extensive knowledge of sensors and statistical methods. Drew’s lab uses mice, a cornerstone of neuroscience research, to study anxiety, mood, memory and behavior. They generate data that can help gain deeper understanding of human neurological disorders and disease because we share similar nervous system organization.
Eventually, Salamone and Drew noticed that their labs share a focus on phenomena not visible to the naked eye — structural health and anxiety behaviors, respectively. They began exploring how Salamone's acoustic emission tools could bridge these fields, using sound waves to collect data that would advance neuroscience research.
They arrived at a proposal that uses Salamone’s sensor expertise to design a cage floor that can track a mouse’s movements. This way Drew and his lab can hear a rodent’s different behavioral states by analyzing sound wave data that would reveal a mouse’s tiniest twitch or startle reflex.
"Working with engineers has been a fun opportunity to see how they approach problem solving and to learn about the technologies they are advancing," Drew said. "The papers we have produced have generated enthusiasm in both of our fields, so we are encouraged to keep moving forward. APX gave us the chance to conceive and try out a very cool idea."
Creative Thinkers Make the Big Breakthroughs
Discovering and nurturing bold collaborations opens the door for major breakthroughs. Funding sponsors who are pushing the boundaries also recognize this. Last year, an APX participant captured the attention of a prestigious program which provides multi-year, flexible grants designed to support high-risk, cutting-edge research that traditional funding often overlooks.
Electrical and computer engineering associate professor David Soloveichik was named a 2023 Schmidt Sciences Polymath, an honor that he directly links to the retreat. On the award application he included his “Many-Worlds Mental Health Intervention” APX project to illustrate that he is an unconventional thinker with success in collaborating far beyond his own discipline. Soloveichik and Julie Zuniga from the School of Nursing worked together to bridge human and physical sciences by exploring how quantum mechanics' profoundly counterintuitive picture of reality - including parallel universes - could help break cycles of negative self-focused thinking.
"The APX retreat was unlike anything I've experienced before," Soloveichik said. "The exercises pushed us to stretch beyond our comfort zones and discover non-obvious connections. The retreat fostered exactly the kind of unconventional thinking that the Schmidt Science Polymath program seeks to support."