ADVANCING EQUITY

As a classified Minority-Serving and Hispanic-Serving Institution, UNT researchers are finding innovative and interdisciplinary ways to advance equity in all areas of society, from health care and education to industry.

TEXT: AMANDA FULLER

PHOTOGRAPHY: AHNA HUBNIK

Maria Otero (right) was volunteering at a summer camp for children with special needs when she frst witnessed the life-changing power of applied behavior analysis.

“I’d hang out with some kids one summer, and by the next summer they’d made a ton of improvement,” she says.“It was a common thread that a lot of these kids were getting applied behavior analysis therapy.”

Born in Colombia, Otero migrated to the U.S. at the age of fve as a political refugee with her mother and older sister. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in behavioral analysis at UNT — one of few universities in the nation to ofer the program to undergraduates — she’s now a second-year doctoral candidate and a member of G-RISE, a National Institutes of Health-funded program that recruits and prepares a diverse pool of doctoral scientists for careers in the biomedical research felds.

She’s well on her way, currently serving as a board-certifed behavior analyst at Cook Children’s Hospital providing early intensive behavioral interventions to children with autism spectrum disorder.

Trough her research in the lab of Manish Vaidya, associate professor of behavior analysis, Otero is working to develop technologies that enable clinicians, teachers and other caregivers to be more efcient and efective in providing datadriven interventions for children with learning difculties.

“I focus on creating technologies that help facilitate learning for children,” she says.“Systemically speaking, there just aren’t enough people to provide the services they need, and that can set them behind for the rest of their lives. But we can make a diference; through research and through technology that is user-friendly and accessible, we can bridge those gaps.”

As a classifed Minority-Serving and Hispanic-Serving Institution, UNT’s research is more than ever focused on creating equity and addressing real issues plaguing our society from health care, research and education to opportunities for those often underserved entering the workforce. Tis past year, UNT saw a number of frsts for its HSI initiative, including membership in Excelencia in Education’s Presidents for Latino Student Success, a network of college and university leaders committed to cultivating a learning environment where Latino students thrive.

Te partnership came shortly after UNT announced its founding membership in the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities, a group of 21 of the nation’s top research universities committed to increasing opportunity for students historically underserved by higher education. Members strive to achieve two key goals by 2030: to double their number of Hispanic doctoral students and increase their Hispanic professoriate by 20%.

“Becoming more intentional in the steps we take to serve all of our students will have far-reaching benefts for not just all of the members of UNT’s diverse and caring community,” says Pam Padilla, vice president of research and innovation,“but our society at large as these innovative thinkers create solutions for a more equitable future.”

Health Care Gaps

UNT’s Center for Racial and Ethnic Equity in Health and Society (CREEHS) continues to increase its impact, engaging faculty from all disciplines to increase the quality of life for all Texans by narrowing longstanding racial and ethnic gaps in health care. Created in 2020, CREEHS investigates health inequity in the systems and conditions in which people in Texas, live, work and learn.

As part of the center’s research, Head Start to Healthy Lifestyles is a fve-year project led by Tao Zhang and Jean Keller, professors of kinesiology, health promotion and recreation. Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Texas Department of Health and Human Services, the program is a large-scale partnership with Child Care Associates, Texas Woman’s University, Denton ISD and Tarrant Area Food Bank administered through Head Start and by parents at home to explore how physical activity and evidence-based nutrition can improve health outcomes for preschoolers from underserved communities.

“We want to help these children live healthier, more meaningful lives, and that starts with establishing good physical activity habits at a young age,” Zhang says.

Additionally, medical sociologist Gül Seçkin, an associate professor of sociology and CREEHS faculty associate, was struck by how the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a growing threat to health equity in the U.S.: digital health misinformation and how it afects marginalized communities and communities of color. She is working to create a tool for a wide range of communities that will strengthen digital health literacy and build more trust in the medical system.

“Te goal is to help people, especially older adults, develop the skills to assess the credibility of information they access online,” she says.

Changing Education

For Karisma Morton, assistant professor of mathematics education, the frst step to transforming the future landscape of education is transforming future teachers. How children learn math — and more importantly, what they believe about how they learn math — is deeply infuenced by cultural and societal factors. Trough her scholarly work and teaching, Morton investigates the mechanisms through which gender and racial inequities in STEM education occur and works to instill the principles of equity-minded pedagogy in preservice elementary teachers. In her classes, Morton cultivates opportunities for her students to interact with the concepts of justice-oriented pedagogy, to refect on their own experiences as math learners and deepen their understanding of the various challenges and approaches.

“I want to leave them with tools and a new perspective of what math learning can be for all children,” she says.

Morton was a member of the 2022 cohort of the UNT D.C. Faculty Research Fellows Program, which provides tenure-track assistant professors with connections to national agencies and mentorship in how to secure funding for research.

“My focus is the students in front of me,” she says,“and the students in front of them.”

Additionally, Nandika D’Souza, Regents Professor and associate dean in the College of Engineering, is serving as lead principal investigator on a new $800,000 NSF grant awarded to UNT and the North Central Texas College to create more opportunities for Latino/a students and communities in engineering. Te program will incorporate community-building, networking, academic assistance and career coaching to create research-informed institutional change.

In addition to receiving the 2022 Distinguished Service Award from the Women in Engineering ProActive Network, D’Souza also earned the 2022 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award from the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering for her commitment to incorporating diversity, equity and inclusion in her research and teaching.

“It’s meaningful to have diversity and equity work recognized by industry,” D’Souza says. “Tat’s how you grow opportunity for students. We can do so much more together.”

Step It Up

Melissa Savage, assistant professor of educational psychology and faculty asso ciate in UNT’s Center for Racial and Ethnic Equity in Health and Society, is research ing a group that often faces barriers to in clusion in healthy habits: individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Despite laws that have been enacted to facilitate inclusive participation, many of the most popular opportunities — like the Special Olympics and community pro grams — are still segregated.

Savage, along with colleagues from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have created a program called Step It Up to research self-management strategies to support individuals with disabilities in exercise and use that information to cre ate effective, scalable interventions.

Her project began with a $30,000 pilot re search grant from the Organization for Au tism Research that focused on the individ ual factors contributing to adults with disabilities participating in physical activi ty, employing self-management tech niques and social support through individ ual coaches. The study reinforced Savage’s belief that although it is crucial to build skills and capability at the individual level, meaningful inclusion requires a sys temic solution.

“Equality and access are there, but the social barriers make inclusive partici pation more challenging,” she says, adding that the next phase of the proj ect will be a multi-site partnership with UNC researchers.

The teams will build on Savage’s pilot pro gram, engaging with caregivers, support professionals, exercise professionals and community leaders to remove barriers to inclusion, shift perspectives and establish inclusive fitness experiences ranging from classes and programs to community events. She will work with CREEHS to re cruit participants representative of the ra cial and socioeconomic diversity of North Texas communities and has already be gun securing community partners includ ing The Rec of Grapevine.

“Another big part of our work is to ensure we involve individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in our research and find better methods to help us do that,” Savage says. “Learning from indi viduals directly and their experiences can support increasing healthy habits for all.”

Faculty members Lauren Cross, Jon Nelson, Liss LaFleur and Katherine Sobering are pursuing their creative endeavors as part of the 2022-23 Institute for the Advancement of the Arts Faculty Fellows program.

UNT is committed to fostering creativity and launched the IAA in 2009 to support and advance excellence in the visual, performing, creative and literary arts. Each year, the university selects professors to be part of the Faculty Fellows program, which enables UNT faculty to focus on creative endeavors for a semester and then bring their enhanced perspectives to teaching.

From a new media music composition inspired by time and sound and an exhibition on African American fber art traditions to original research on the childbirth experiences of queer people in America, this year’s fellows come from a range of disciplines to ofer unique contributions in their felds of study.