At the morning panel moderated by UNT innovation & commericailazation director Myrriah Tomar, experts from academic, investment and startup backgrounds provided insight into how universities, industry and investors collaborate to transform research discoveries into real-world solutions.

One major hurdle for principal investigators and researchers is product development. Maggie Colonnetta, senior associate at academic support nonprofit Research Bridge Partners, said understanding the marketplace is key.

“The biggest barrier is having the context to know what product you are actually creating and for what market, because in order to use the resources effectively, you need to know the roadmap,” Colonnetta said.

To balance successful impact and commercialization, NVV Ventures managing director Chad Ronholt said it’s important that researchers understand industry processes.

“If the regulatory path is too hard, if I can’t scale it up, if I can’t do manufacturing … I’m going to pass on it,” Ronholt said. “It might be a fantastic, awesome technology, but you’ve got to think about how to get it to market.”

Mia Joiner, vice president of startup banking at J.P. Morgan, advised researchers should be prepared to bridge the gap between innovation and selling their ideas.

“When you move from grant funding to venture capital funding, you’re going from academic researcher to salesperson,” Joiner said. “Pulling your team together is very important, but in the early stages, you’re the team — you’re doing it all.”

Ram Garg, a startup advisor and angel investor who previously worked with companies like IBM and Oracle, emphasized that tenacity is the key to success.

“You’ve got to be persistent,” Garg said. “What you started with might not be the same thing you become successful with.”

Moderated by Carrie Allen, executive director of UNT’s Learning Ecosystem for Empowering Futures, Research Day’s noon panel focused on the challenges of AI use in higher education and how that can impact what students actually learn.

“We used to know what students learn by looking at their product, but we can’t do that anymore,” said Ji Hyun Yu, assistant professor of learning technologies. “Students read an AI summary and they might feel like, ‘Oh, I get this.’ But ask them to explain it, defend it and use it on a new problem, and they cannot. Psychologists call this ‘the illusion of fluency’ or ‘the fluency trap.’”

One way to avoid letting students fall into that fluency trap is to evaluate their thought process on a given assignment, rather than judging a final work product.

“I think we need to start thinking about the steps that led to that product,” said Ryan Boettger, professor of technical communication. “I want to know how they got through the process.”

He said one way he does this in his senior level AI and automation course is to have the students send him the link to their ChatGPT transcript so he can review their prompts and see how they're thinking through the problem.

Deborah Cockerham, clinical assistant professor of learning technologies, suggested educators need to prioritize teaching students the human skills that AI can’t replicate, such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking. Additionally, Alena Moon, associate professor of chemistry, emphasized the need to teach students how to evaluate knowledge products themselves, citing a study out of Spain that found holding an undergraduate degree wasn’t an indicator of an individual’s ability to recognize pseudoscience.

As the interdisciplinary panel considered ways to address these challenges, the consensus answer was to work together to support student success.

“When communities fall apart, younger generations tend to carry the consequences,” said Upward Bound project coordinator Mai Zaru. “The more we divide, the wider the cracks become. It's finding spaces like this, collaborations where you're bridging across departments is how we help our students not fall through these cracks.”

Postdoctoral researchers got a rundown of the campus resources available to them — and a chance to shape what comes next — during the “Postdoctoral Scholars & Early-Career Scientists” panel.

Moderated by Melanie Ecker, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and principal investigator of the Ecker Lab, panelists walked through what their offices offer, from one-on-one teaching consultations and monthly LEEF After Hours dinners to faculty writing retreats, promotion and tenure workshops and individualized visa sponsorship support. Their shared advice: start early on your network, publication record and recommendation letters and look beyond your own department.

"Really connect with people that may be outside of your department or content area and learn about their journeys and experiences," said Jeannette Ginther, faculty development specialist in the Office of Faculty Success.

When postdocs in the audience asked for help, panelists had resources ready or on the way. LEEF will soon launch a teaching portfolio workshop series to help postdocs market themselves. The Office of Faculty Success is developing a program on managing a team, an idea Ginther had already proposed, noting that being a trained researcher doesn't mean you've been taught how to lead. A postdoc-to-faculty boot camp next spring will cover everything from research statements to interview prep.

The session closed with news that UNT is reviving its Postdoctoral Association. The group is seeking postdocs for leadership roles and will help organize workshops, socials and, potentially, conference travel awards. The panel also featured Kathryn Raign, associate director of LEEF’s Teaching Hub, and Rekha Gopalakrishnan, associate director of International Student and Scholar Services.

The day culminated in a panel titled “Research for Broader Impact,” where graduate and undergraduate students shared the research they’ve been conducting while at UNT.

“We want to highlight our students’ research and show that their impact extends beyond our campus,” said Brenda Barrio, associate vice president of Graduate Studies and Student Research.

Five students presented four projects with topics ranging from nutritional care for dementia patients to environmental assessments. Each student also shared how the knowledge from their research can go on to benefit the general public.

Starting the panel was Rubayet Tonmoy, who presented his research on deepfakes made with artificial intelligence. His work is a two-pronged approach that focuses on detection and protection. First, he’s developing AI software that can detect if a video is deepfake by training it on real videos of people talking and moving. He’s also developing a program that can add “noise” to an image or video that makes an AI incapable of using it.

“You don’t have to work in AI to be affected by it,” Tonmoy said. “My work focuses on the gap between detection and protection, so you don’t get manipulated by it.”

Next was Chris Smith, an undergraduate studying anthropology. She surveyed opinions on multifunctional and convertible clothing, such as pants that can be turned into shorts, as a way to promote sustainable fashion. She hopes to work with fashion designers to create clothing that combines the idea of multifunctional clothing with the fashion desires of the public.

After Smith, Juliana Abude-Aribo presented her research on how care differed between hospitals when performing feeding device insertion surgery on dementia patients. She’s also looking at which patient characteristics were more associated with receiving the surgery and if the timing of the surgery affected the patient’s length of stay in the hospital.

The final presentation came from Liliane Olivarez and Luis Ibarra, both undergraduates who interned with the volunteer organization Friends of Bachman Lake. Bachman Lake is a greenspace and recreational area in Northwest Dallas.

The duo completed multiple assessments for the organization about the area around the lake, such as a tree survey and bioblitz to find as many different species as they could on the land. They also provided the organization with recommendations on managing the land to support more native species and holding more public education events.

“Dallas is part of the Northern Blackland Prairie ecoregion, which can only be found in Texas,” Ibarra said. “However, less than 1% percent of 170 million acres that were in our region remain. It’s important we work together to take care of the green spaces we have left.”