Students, faculty and staff gathered Thursday for UTA President Jennifer Cowley’s annual State of the University address at Texas Hall. During the address, Cowley covered a wide range of topics, from academic expansion, such as a new doctoral program pending state approval, to ongoing issues such as campus parking. Parking The fall semester brought the highest demand for parking in the university's history, Cowley said. As a result, UTA added flexible parking options, reallocating parking spaces and communicating with permit holders. The Parking and Transportation Services office added 400 spaces to the South and East Zones and allocated about 50 unused staff parking spots in Lot 34 to the West Zone, according to previous Shorthorn reporting. “Your voices are shaping these responses, and I promise it's going to get a little bit better in the spring,” Cowley said. Grants and Investments The College of Nursing and Health Innovation recently received a $5.1 million grant from the Nursing Shortage Reduction Program, which lets the college expand its partnerships with school districts to create nursing academies in high schools, allowing students to begin earning credit toward nursing degrees. The UT System also approved the allocation of $126 million over three years to support improvements in existing buildings, providing resources to replace rooms, upgrade electrical systems and modernize classrooms. Programs and research During the fall, UTA launched two bachelor’s degree programs in hospitality management, new minors in philanthropy and space systems, and academic tracks in the graduate nurse practitioner program and undergraduate theater arts program. Pending state approval, the university is set to launch a social work doctoral program, aimed at addressing the need for social work leaders, Cowley said. With the growth of artificial intelligence and the boom of data centers, presidential distinguished professor Dereje Agonafer is leading a U.S. Department of Energy-funded project to reduce the energy consumption to less than 5%. Flag football The university is planning to launch the first Division I women’s flag football team in Texas, set to begin play in the spring of 2027. Athletics director Jon Fagg is in the process of recruiting the first coach for the team. Student, faculty and staff support Starting this fall semester, the family income threshold for the Blaze Forward Program rose from $85,000 to $100,000, providing 60% of all full-time undergraduate students coverage for mandatory fees and tuition. This fall, UTA is launching a new peer-to-peer recognition program, where faculty and staff can fill out a digital card to celebrate the work of their colleagues. “Consider it the digital equivalent of a gold star,” Cowley said. Tamara Brown, UTA provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs, shared in a speech that the Communities Foundation of Texas awarded Emerging Mavericks, a program designed to support students with lived experience in foster care or homelessness, with a $250,000 grant aimed at improving and expanding the mission of supporting the student population. “These support systems are directly strengthening our students' ability to stay enrolled, persist through the challenges and graduate on time, ultimately improving our retention and preparing them to enter the work force, ready to excel,” Brown said. @tay._.sansom news-editor.shorthorn@uta.edu

A new class, spirituality in medicine, has made its way into the medical humanities curriculum, allowing students to explore human connection in medicine in a way UTA has never done before. Dr. Steven Gellman was a family doctor for 31 years, and he said in that time, patients would often complain about the lack of empathy and understanding they received from other doctors, saying those doctors saw them as nothing more than a lab or X-ray that needed to be done. Gellman said these interactions left him wanting a better future for medicine, so he took it upon himself to make it happen. In 2018, Gellman presented to the College of Liberal Arts the idea of forming a medical humanities program, which would teach students about bedside manners, how to treat patients and how to bond with them. Seven years and seven new classes later, Gellman and Kenneth Williford, associate professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities, introduced spirituality in medicine to UTA students for the first time in school history. The course is a team-taught class that features 14 guest teachers, including current UTA faculty, as well as hospital chaplains and retired theology professors, all with diverse backgrounds. Gellman said the class is not a memorization class, unlike a lot of premed courses. It is more about deep thinking. “What's important to you? What are your biases? So when you see another patient, you understand who you are, so you can relate better to them and put your biases aside,” he said. Students do writing assignments and participate in discussions in class. The course ends with a final creative project at the Central Library FabLab with the help of experiential learning librarian Chloé Bennett. It aims to highlight the connection between a student’s own spirituality and the spirituality in medicine. Gellman said that all of his classes incorporate a creative project. “It’s going to be a terrific opportunity for a little different kind of creativity, but still relevant to the course and allow students to really get involved,” Gellman said. Pre-nursing sophomore Jennifer Salgado said she heard good things about Gellman and was recommended the class by one of her public health teachers. She said the class has allowed her to explore in a way other classes haven't the difference between spirituality and religion and how both can affect patient care. “It really impacts the way someone can be taken care of,” Salgado said. “If you take into account people's religion and spirituality, I feel like that can really benefit them or maybe make their experience better.” Salgado used the example of Jehovah's Witnesses not being able to accept blood transfusions due to their beliefs as an example of how a patient’s beliefs can affect their care. She said a physician can provide better care if they can understand and see the person for who they are. Pre-nursing sophomore Thomas Puentes shared similar sentiments and said understanding a patient's background, culture or beliefs and having a sense of who a person is helps build that connection. “You’re not just treating people, like their illness, you're treating their spirit in a way,” Puentes said. Puentes said his experience when getting surgery wasn't great, feeling like the doctors never considered his feelings in the matter and were only worried about getting the surgery and post-op done. After three weeks in the class, Puentes said he came to realize that it can change the way doctors treat patients not only by helping them feel better, but also by making them feel better about themselves and keeping their identity intact. On Sept. 4, before introducing guest speaker Dr. Thuthuy Nguyen, the class began the same way every class does, with a song from the class playlist. Each student submitted a song they felt spoke to them. Nguyen then led an interactive discussion where the class explored what spirituality meant to them, the real-world implications of spirituality in medical practice and how students can use spirituality to reduce stress as future medical professionals. After some discussion, Nguyen asked the class to close their eyes and led them through a meditative exercise. As the students sat there, the humming of the air conditioner filled the room as they took deep breaths while Nguyen talked them through the path oxygen takes through the body. “As these molecules traverse down your trachea into your lungs, it hits the alveoli, where there's gas exchange and you get oxygen molecules that travel into the heart that pumps these molecules of good red oxygen to the rest of your body,” Nguyen said. Later in the semester, guest speaker Eli Shupe, co-director of the medical humanities and bioethics program and philosophy and humanities assistant professor at UTA, will talk about postmortem issues and how different religious groups view what happens to the body after death, giving students another view of spirituality in medicine. With the addition of more classes in the medical humanities, the department offers a minor and a certificate that students can sign up. “It’s blossomed into a really large and growing program,” Shupe said. A student club, Mavericks for Medical Humanities, has also formed, as well as a creative journal, called Stimulus, where students can submit creative work to be published. Gellman said the Liberal Arts Dean Office and philosophy department have offered tremendous encouragement and support, as well as invaluable assistance to the growth of the medical humanities program. “I came here with a vision,” Gellman said. “The vision was to improve the future of health care. So I know that sounds pretty idealistic and maybe kind of naive, but that was my vision, and this is how I'm doing it.” @wall035203 @diegocllazo news-editor.shorthorn@uta.edu