The Honors College empowers students to gain a deeper understanding of their field of study, enrich their lives, and further their professional ambitions all while making a positive difference. To achieve these goals, Honors students can participate in Praxis Labs for 6 credits toward Honors electives. These year-long labs are led by two faculty members and are guided by up to 14 students from varying disciplines who participate in community-based and actionable projects that seek to solve a pressing societal issue.
“Praxis Labs are one of the most exciting opportunities at the Honors College. Every lab is different, shaped by the students and faculty involved, and it’s incredible to see the ideas that come out of them,” said Dominic Pecoraro, Honors Special Programs associate director.
“Over the course of a year, students from different backgrounds come together to tackle big, real-world challenges—things like responsible AI, environmental exposure and health or culturally preventive health. In the first semester, they dive deep into the topic through lectures, panels and site visits. In the second semester, students take the lead on a project, whether that’s leading original research, forging a policy proposal or prescribing an action plan.”
With an emphasis on helping students engage with unfamiliar ideas and identify needs in the community, Praxis Labs allow students to apply what they’ve learned to real-world, practical challenges.
“In Praxis labs, students grapple with complex real-world challenges and opportunities, such as how algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping criminal justice in the state of Utah,” Honors College Dean Monisha Pasupathi said. “Then, they put their knowledge into practice alongside community partners from the very local to statewide and beyond. They have provided white papers to the Governor’s office and seeded ongoing programs like the Utah Prison Education Project and Connect2Health.”
U students McKenna Hall and Aspen Delis interviewed the 2024-25 Praxis Lab participants to document the experiences.
Three Praxis Labs will run during the 2025-26 year. Honors students can register for a lab as they do for any other Honors courses during the Fall semester registration process in April.
This Praxis Lab uses Salt Lake City as an exemplar and case study in focusing on the intersections of environment, health, and advances in research methodology and data collection.
Environmental exposure, both air quality and extreme temperatures, are becoming increasingly important as research identifies their negative health impacts. Understanding the patterns of exposure is critical to better inform these impacts, examine environmental disparities and advise vulnerable populations of potential risk. There has been a recent growth in monitoring approaches for environmental exposure that include ground-based stations, satellite data and modeling. However, the large amount of data available, coupled with their variable spatial and temporal distribution, and changing conditions pose a unique challenge to their thorough and accurate analysis. Recent growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods offer potential solutions to a) integrate these data; b) develop robust forecasting tools and c) effectively communicate the results.
In this 2025-26 Praxis Lab, we will learn about artificial intelligence techniques to analyze the data set in novel ways to more precisely and quickly understand patterns and potential areas of risk. Salt Lake County offers a ideal testbed for these methods: a unique observation platform has been developed over the past decade which includes reliable, research-grade, air pollutant and meteorological sensors mounted on light rail train cars and electric buses that have collected millions of data points for over a decade. This data complements the network of stationary regulatory and research grade sensors managed by the Utah Division of Air Quality and the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, respectively. Taken together, this provides a more nuanced view of local hotspots of exposure and potential areas of concern for public health. During this class, we will review the impacts of environmental exposure, discuss how this is monitored and associated data issues, introduce AI methodologies and use hands-on exercises to produce improved understanding of individual exposures. We will invite guest speakers to discuss the implications of improved exposure estimates on health and policy as well as contextualizing and communicating the findings.
Meeting Time: Th 5:15-8:15 p.m.
Faculty: Daniel Mendoza, PhD - Research Associate Professor, Atmospheric Science and Simon Brewer, PhD - Associate Professor, Environment, Society, & Sustainability
Want a good life? Societal messages tell us to study hard and work harder, but this truism ignores the realities of economic inequality, climate change, and increasing corporate power. This Praxis Lab will examine how work is an often-overlooked institution that helps sustain unfair systems, health inequities, and environmental injustice – but also one that could be leveraged for increased social justice. Students will learn about work as a social construct and as a cause of health, ill-health, and health inequities. They will explore work’s ties to major challenges of our time. They’ll understand how to locate both the roots of problems and the shoots of future possibilities in the history of work in the United States. Students will leave this praxis lab equipped with knowledge that work is something they have the right and responsibility to influence, and the vision, knowledge, language, and experience to shape work that serves our collective interests into the future.
Meeting Time: Th 2-5 p.m.
Faculty: Emily Ahonen, PHD, MPH – Director, U-POWER and Camie Schafer, PhD – Associate Director, U-POWER
This course will offer an introduction to past, current, and possible future research and clinical applications of psychedelics within the field of mental health. Medicinal use of psychedelics, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, ethical considerations, and pertinent ongoing research at the University of Utah will be discussed in various lectures throughout the course. The course will culminate with support to create and implement a project with potential to be disseminated on a community-wide level.
Meeting Time: W 3-6 p.m.
Faculty: Tomas Melicher, MD – Assistant Professor (Clinical), Psychiatry and Amanda Stoeckel, PhD - Interim Senior Program Manager/Clinical Director (CAT), Psychiatry