Hundreds of research posters filled the Emerald Ballroom across the morning and afternoon poster sessions, giving attendees the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of research topics. The poster session also gives student researchers an opportunity to practice explaining their research to more general audiences.

“This is of course a part of our core mission as a Research 1 university,” said UNT President Harrison Keller, Ph.D. “We work on the frontiers of human knowledge and discovery and innovation, and it is inspiring and exciting to be here with you and hear about the work that’s underway.”

A common theme across many of the posters was research into artificial intelligence. A few considered potential drawbacks of AI proliferation to overcome, such as the spread of misinformation, hidden biases and privacy risks, while others looked into promising applications of AI, such as counting crowds in auditoriums, supporting rural nurse practitioners to expand healthcare availability and detecting cyber threats. Applied AI & Data Science was also the topic of the morning panel discussion.

“We have posters from every college across disciplines,” Padilla said in her welcoming remarks. “I really encourage you to talk to people outside your department and look at all of the great work and great research that we do from our students up to our faculty. This is a great pleasure to see the breadth and depth of research that we have going at UNT.”

Another prominent theme of this year’s University Research Day was collaboration with UNT Health in Fort Worth. It served as the topic of the afternoon panel discussion and 30 UNT Health researchers participated in the afternoon poster session.

“We are deepening our partnership with UNT Health across multiple fronts here at our Denton campus and at our Frisco campus,” Keller said. “They’re terrific partners. We’re separate institutions, but we’re family and we’ve got big plans for the future.”

Morning Panel: Applied AI & Data Science

The Applied AI and Data Science Panel featured six panelists who spoke on the future of artificial intelligence use: Mark Albert, Junhua Ding, Michael Monticino, Jessica Craig and Benjamin Brand, all from UNT, and Usha Sambamoorthi visiting from UNT Health. Together they represented the College of Information, the Department of Criminal Justice, the Division of Digital Strategy and Innovation and UNT Health’s College of Pharmacy.

Song Fu, from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, moderated the panel and opened by sharing a number from a recent Google survey – out of 5,000 respondents, 90% of tech industry workers are now using artificial intelligence in their day-to-day job.

The panelists shared how they used AI in their roles and opportunities for it to change their field from creating personalized health care to helping increase access to legal services.

“Pattern recognition in deep learning optimization models is revolutionizing our world right now,” Monticino said. “We need to rethink how we teach because industries want employees with AI skills.”

The panel also took questions from the audience where they discussed how AI can be used in the classroom without being over-relied upon.

“A lot of things are becoming automated, but you’re not learning the same way you did before,” Albert said. “You have to focus on the learning, not just the doing. Carve out time for it.”

The discussion ended with Fu announcing the launch of the new Applied Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Institute at UNT. The institute will focus on collaborations across disciplines at UNT and UNT Health connecting faculty with one another to find new ways to leverage AI in their research.

Afternoon Panel: Better Together — Advancing Research through UNT & UNT Health Collaboration

Aaron Roberts, associate vice president of research and professor of environmental toxicology, hosted a discussion panel with researchers from UNT Health Fort Worth and the Denton campus to discuss new funding for teams working across facilities.

Panelist Nicole Phillips, associate professor of microbiology, immunology and genetics at UNT Health, announced two new grants awarded to researchers cross-collaborating between the Denton campus and UNT Health during the Interdisciplinary Team Science (ITS) awards discussion in the UNT Senate Chamber. This allows students and faculty cross-campus collaborating on research in any department to apply for two different funding tracks: exploratory – up to $50K/$25K per campus  – (new collaborations, preliminary data) and impact – up to $100k/$50K per campus – (advance established teams toward external grant submissions).

For going on ten years, Dr. Amie Lund, animal biology researcher and professor of environmental toxicology at UNT, and Dr. Rebecca L. Cunningham, associate dean for research and professor of pharmaceutical sciences at UNT Health, have been collaborating across campuses. Their work contributed to the creation of the ITS awards, which are designed to “foster new and established collaborations between UNT and UNT Health.”

Together, Dr. Lund and Dr. Cunningham’s teams explore mercury as an environmental toxin and how it impacts organisms and their offspring. Their work has reached the attention of at least five publications and received a team science grant to fund further developments in the topic.

“It started by Amie contacting me to serve on her student’s committee," Cunningham said. “We began to have discussions, and with things you notice about your expertise, there’s a lot of overlap. From those discussions, we realized their strengths and my strengths synergize.”

“In addition to building this network for research, it also gives students the opportunity to cross train expertise in different laboratories and work with people with different levels of experience,” Lund said. “We needed an endocrinologist for a student study, which I’m not, but luckily Becky is. We were able to bring in someone with that expertise for my graduate student and as they’ve now left, they have that skillset in their toolbox.”

Students Showcase Invaluable Research Opportunities

A critical component to every University Research Day is the Student Showcase. Every year, dozens of Poster Session submissions are evaluated and a handful are selected for the Student Showcase, giving student researchers the opportunity to sharpen their presentation skills through the creation of slide decks and talking points that explain their research.

The morning Student Showcase highlighted research in the humanities with presentations by educational psychology Ph.D. students Kristi Fillenworth and Laurie Williams George, and Ryan College of Business graduate student Jeremiah McGhee. The afternoon session was focused on research in STEM areas, featuring electrical engineering graduate student Danah Omary, biomedical engineering student Angello H. Gomez and biological sciences undergraduate student Emily Coronado.

The Language of Ability

Kristi Fillenworth and Laurie Williams George, Ph.D. students in educational psychology, presented their systematic content analysis of strength-based language in autism research. For both researchers, the topic is something they deal with in everyday life.

“I work full-time assessing 2 to 3-year-olds for autism,” Fillenworth said. “I was noticing that when I’m explaining to families, it’s such a devastating explanation to them.”

To Fillenworth, the focus on diagnostics creates an issue. “We are looking for the deficits because we want to fix these deficits. I feel when we use those words disability or disorder it’s creating division.”

As an advocate for suicide prevention, Fillenworth is aware that suicide is the number one cause of premature death in autistic individuals. To her, this is why the language researchers use is so important. 

For Williams George, the topic is even closer to home. “I’m a mother of a child with autism, and I’m also a late-diagnosed autistic female. I was excited to join the project because I am a product of a strength-based upbringing. I did not live with stigma, and my family always embraced who I was.

“We wanted to look at articles that used a strength-based perspective in the abstract. If you’re making that claim, we wanted to see how you’re talking about it,” Williams George said.

The project focused on research using strength-based language in the abstract to see how it was applied. “The way we use language to describe another individual can impact how that individual is seen in society,” Fillenworth said. 

Some of the most mentioned strengths included intense focus on favorite subjects, creativity, memory, empathy and kindness. Their review also found that some characteristics that are often framed as challenges were viewed as strengths by autistic individuals and their families.

One example the pair used to highlight this: Do they engage in rigid or repetitive behaviors, or are they reliable and will adhere to workplace protocols?  “It just depends on how you frame the language,” Fillenworth said.

Williams George presented a word cloud to represent how often each strength was highlighted in the study. “Imagine I’m talking about you. How are you feeling if I say, “You’re funny. You’re loyal. You’re such a good person. I love how practical you are. You’re so humble.’ How does that make you feel? It makes me feel really good.”

Crafting Success in Crowdfunding

Jeremiah McGhee, a management graduate student in the G. Brint Ryan College of Business, presented a project on how different craft entrepreneurs position their product on crowdfunding platforms, specifically Kickstarter.

His goal was to look at how different campaigns adopt specific rhetorical and substantive signals within their marketing to highlight key elements of their product.

The overall arts and cultural industry grew twice the rate of the U.S. economy in 2023 and crafting has been a big part of that. “It also, in addition to the economic impact, has considerable social and cultural impact. Craft acts as a vehicle for cultural knowledge sharing. You can think of it as a kind of art that includes these heritage elements where the pieces are designed to have utility as well as aesthetic appeal.”

This also makes it more challenging to communicate the value to a potential customer. 

Some crafters lean into cultural elements. “The way they position their products is as something that is very culturally authentic,” McGhee said. Meanwhile, others might embrace technology innovation in their approach. “It’s the same product category, but very different positioning. But we don’t know how those strategies converge, or how they drive success.”

McGhee applied costless signaling theory to the project, which looks at language as a resource acquisition tool. This is especially important for performance in crowdfunding, when you want people to buy a product you can’t yet show them.

In order to do this, he used structural topic modeling and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. Essentially, software combed through Kickstarter campaigns to help him identify topics through word co-occurrence. “The assumption of the model is that if two words are co-occurring across thousands of campaigns, they must have some meaningful weight.”

Through the analysis, McGee created signal portfolios, such as ‘heritage master’ or ‘design innovator,’ and identified what strategies were important for each. “We’re able to map it out and identify what separates the high performers from the rest.”

For entrepreneurs that rely on platforms like Kickstarter, success can be the difference between having a concept or a product.

Like a Glove

Electrical engineering Ph.D. student Danah Omary discussed her research into the development of augmented reality hardware and software for the blind and visually impaired. The typical virtual reality experience requires the user to put on a headset to be presented with visual stimuli. Omary’s work has translated that technology from a visual headset to a smart glove that allows blind and visually impaired individuals to experience augmented realities.

Potential applications could allow these individuals to virtually explore historic sites and landmarks or even learn how to navigate a new building before actually visiting it in person. Omary says she was inspired to pursue this project after reading a paper about using 3D printing as assistive technology for the blind and visually impaired.

“I thought 3D printing was kind of limited because you only have the tactile,” Omary said. “What if you could add software capability and functionality to that? I wanted to research assistive technology and make something that could actually help people.”

Heart Health

The next presentation by biomedical engineering Ph.D. student Angello H. Gomez covered groundbreaking research that could advance the study of heart disease. In the lab of assistant professor Adam Yang, Gomez works on a team creating small lab-grown artificial organs called organoids. They fabricated organoids that are vascularized, meaning they have a blood vessel network similar to an actual human heart that allows for more accurate testing and research.

The project was published in Science, one of the world’s top academic journals. Gomez was able to work on the project thanks, in part, to support from the NIH G-RISE program, which supports people from underrepresented backgrounds earning their doctoral degrees in a biomedical field. He says that support has allowed him to contribute to research that is personally meaningful to him.

“I had a cousin who had congenital heart disease, and he didn’t make it. It’s sad because he was in his teens,” Gomez said. “I want to use my skills and knowledge and contribute to lowering cardiovascular disease.”

Just Around the River Bend

The final presentation came from Emily Coronado, an undergraduate student pursuing her bachelor’s degree in ecology for environmental science. She worked on research evaluating river health through dissolved organic carbon composition dynamics in a river that’s undergone a restoration.

The Upper Clark Fork River in western Montana suffered major contamination in 1908 after massive flooding deposited ores and heavy metals from nearby factories and refineries into the river and surrounding floodplain. In 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency designated an upper section of the river as the nation’s largest EPA Superfund site and initiated a $200 million restoration project.

Coronado and a handful of other UNT researchers traveled to Montana to analyze dissolved organic matter quantitatively and qualitatively to determine the health of the river in the aftermath of the EPA’s restoration project. She has presented her research through poster sessions at a few conferences this year, but she says getting to present it to a general audience at University Research Day was an invaluable experience.

“It was a great learning experience,” Coronado said. “Overall, it was just a great opportunity to be able to break down what I'm doing to a general audience and learn how I want to carry myself when I'm presenting and standing up there in front of a group of people.”

Scott Brown, Amanda Lyons, Bradford Osborne and Walker Smart contributed to this story.