The University of Texas Libraries announces the inaugural Scholars Lab Fellows, winners of a competitive fellowship supporting graduate students and researchers whose work leverages innovative digital tools and methodologies to address complex academic questions.
Fellows receive funding, training, and access to state-of-the-art resources at the Scholars Lab to advance their research projects. Each fellow is recognized for their groundbreaking contributions to their respective fields.
Meet this year’s Scholars Lab Fellows and learn about their projects:
Chris Ploetz
Department: Geography
Chris, a PhD candidate specializing in digital archaeology and geoscience, explores human-environment interactions in the Maya lowlands using lidar technology. His project compares drone and traditional aerial lidar to evaluate their ability to detect archaeological features in dense vegetation environments, focusing on Classic Maya sites in Belize. Through point cloud classification algorithms, Chris aims to assess the strengths and limitations of each lidar platform, contributing to the understanding of ancient landscapes.
Eduardo Gorobets Martins
Department: Spanish and Portuguese
Eduardo, a PhD student with expertise in colonial Mexican history, Nahuatl language, and digital humanities, is creating a vocabulary of land conflict documents written in Nahuatl. Using tools like Transkribus, Voyant Tools, and Omeka, his project analyzes 17th-18th-century legal documents from the Puebla-Cholula region to uncover how the Nahua people navigated the Spanish legal system, offering a digital exhibition of these critical historical records.
Jessica Alexander
Department: Linguistics
Jessica’s research focuses on the ways in which vocal emotions impact the auditory experience of the listener. In this project, she uses a vocoder simulation to investigate the challenges faced by cochlear implant users in recognizing both the content of speech and the emotion of the speaker. Results may help advance cochlear implant technologies and provide a deeper understanding of how emotional speech is perceived by human listeners.
Sookja Kang
Department: Nursing
Sookja’s “What to Expect” study analyzes over 4,200 posts from a digital health community to explore the experiences of plus-size pregnant individuals. Using natural language processing, her work identifies gaps in healthcare support and highlights key themes like stigma and provider challenges. The findings aim to improve maternal healthcare inclusivity and accessibility for diverse populations.
Yenibel Ruiz Mirabal
Department: Spanish and Portuguese
A Venezuelan migrant, journalist, and PhD student with expertise in Venezuelan migration and borders in Latin America, Yenibel’s project creates a digital oral history repository documenting the journeys of Afro-Venezuelan migrant women crossing informal borders. Her work combines data visualization and personal narratives to reveal the challenges and empowerment of migrants, aiming to advocate for diverse representations of them in the public sphere and to enrich migration studies. Her theoretical framework draws from Cultural Studies.
The Scholars Lab Fellowship recognizes outstanding research proposals that utilize digital scholarship tools and methodologies. Each fellow receives funding to support their project, training in digital tools and resources, and access to a collaborative community of scholars. This award fosters interdisciplinary research and highlights the transformative potential of digital scholarship across fields.
The fellows will present their work at the annual Scholars Lab Symposium in 2025, showcasing their contributions to their respective disciplines.
For more information on the Scholars Lab Fellowship, visit: https://www.lib.utexas.edu/study-spaces-technology/scholars-lab/scholars-lab-fellows
