Education (Colleges & Universities)
Here's a look at documents from public, private and community colleges in the U.S.
Featured Stories
Yale University: Novel Course Translates Data From the Natural World Into Art
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, April 25 -- Yale University issued the following news release:
* * *
Novel course translates data from the natural world into art
In a new course, Yale students are using AI technologies to transform natural phenomena into artistic performances -- an endeavor that extends into a symposium April 24-25.
Composer Matthew Suttor has been thinking about how to create music from the patterns found in the natural world for decades. It's only been in recent years that he has mastered the art of mapping complex environmental data to musical parameters -- thanks in part to the
... Show Full Article
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, April 25 -- Yale University issued the following news release:
* * *
Novel course translates data from the natural world into art
In a new course, Yale students are using AI technologies to transform natural phenomena into artistic performances -- an endeavor that extends into a symposium April 24-25.
Composer Matthew Suttor has been thinking about how to create music from the patterns found in the natural world for decades. It's only been in recent years that he has mastered the art of mapping complex environmental data to musical parameters -- thanks in part to theemergence of artificial intelligence.
Suttor, who is also a Yale lecturer, has shared his ideas around data sonification this spring in a new course, "Nature, AI and Performance." During the semester students have been invited to experiment with translating natural phenomena into performative expressions, using AI and visual programming software (including a program known as Max) at Yale's Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM).
After collecting data from the natural world -- the movements of chickens in a yard at Yale Farm, climate data from Sacramento, California, information on glacier retraction in the North Cascades -- the students have experimented with how it might be reflected musically using AI data-mapping tools.
"It's taking something that's happening in the real world in, say, three dimensions, and then mapping that to the parameters of music," said Suttor, program manager at CCAM and a senior lecturer in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "That mapping of really large data sets is something that AI does easily, but human beings aren't quite so great at."
The course also spawned a parallel project, funded by a Yale Planetary Solutions seed grant, which brought these same concepts into the New Haven public schools in a collaboration with research colleagues, including the Yale School of Public Health's Judith Lichtman, and Music Haven, an education organization that provides tuition-free classes and mentoring for young people. Other partners included Konrad Kaczmarek, an associate professor in the Yale Department of Music, Diego Ellis Soto '24 Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jonathan Gewirtzman, a Ph.D. student at the Yale School of the Environment.
The creative outcomes from that project, called "Listening to Climate Change," will be presented at a two-day symposium at CCAM on April 25-26.
"It was the most amazing experience," said Lichtman, the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology, and director of the Humanities, Arts, and Public Health Practice at Yale Initiative (HAPPY). "The students were creating music on the fly, but they were also connecting with each other. They were hearing each other. As somebody who's in the discipline of public health, it made me realize how much more we could do by engaging with a young audience."
A marriage of art and data
During a recent "Nature, AI and Performance" class session in CCAM's Leeds Studio, Keeley Brooks and Nate Strothkamp, Yale College undergraduates who are both violinists, performed a piece composed by Suttor called "No Time to Delay." The composition is based on data reflecting rising global temperatures since 1880.
At the start of the piece, the students played the strings in the lower register and then incrementally climbed higher in pitch, gradually at first and suddenly sharply higher and somewhat dissonant toward the end.
Brooks, a Yale senior majoring in music, became interested in the course after working with a U.S. Forest Service researcher last summer.
"She was studying wildfire acoustics, trying to figure out what sound waves can tell us about how fast fires are moving and what they're burning," Brooks said. "That has really influenced how I've looked for courses this past year."
Her own composition for the course is based on data charting streamflow melt from the glaciers in the Cascades Range in Washington. The project required consultation with a researcher who's been collecting data on the glaciers for more than 40 years.
"What's been really exciting about this class is we've not only been thinking about these evolving processes and how we can represent them with art, but actually sonifying the data," Brooks said.
Powell Munro Holzner, a Yale sophomore who's interested in evolutionary biology, anthropology, and performance studies, was enthusiastic about taking the course because he loves "trying to communicate the world to people in as many ways as I can." For his final project, he created a composition for voice, with orchestral backing, inspired by telescopic data charting the positions of planets and asteroids in the solar system.
"I was inspired by a lot of Indigenous polyphonic singing traditions, and I've been doing archival research to support that," Holzner said.
Tapping into a new language
This spring, Holzner and some of the other students in Suttor's class also served as volunteers with the Listening to Climate Change initiative.
That project came about after Lichtman -- an expert on the epidemiology of strokes and heart disease who also teaches a course on humanities, arts, and public health at CCAM -- became fascinated with Suttor's work on data sonification and how it might extend to creatively relaying information about issues of public health, including climate change. She proposed they write a grant proposal together for an initiative that would engage students in the New Haven public schools.
"To tell effective stories about health and communities and environment, you need to engage creative mechanisms," Lichtman said. "So much of my work has been writing research papers, and they go to my peers and colleagues, but I think to have a very important impact on the community, it's important to think of other ways to relay information."
Suttor and Yaira Matyakubova, Music Haven's artistic director, led interactive sessions with students in the music program. While elementary school-age students engaged in simpler musical exercises (like playing what they thought a bird might sound like on their instruments), middle school and high school students created compositions inspired by environmental data, including bird flocking patterns and shifting ecosystems, using specialized software developed with support from the YPS Seed Grant.
"What took me by surprise, and also everyone around me, was how extraordinarily empowering it was for them," Suttor said. "Often, we underestimate what children understand. They do understand what's going on and they have language for it and they can tell stories about it."
Their compositions will be performed by Music Haven's professional string quartet during a concert on Friday, April 25, as part of the symposium. Also that evening, students from Suttor's course will present their compositions and other creative performances.
The concert will be followed by a moderated conversation about the integration of music, environmental science, and climate advocacy. Participants will be Vivek Hari Sridhar, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany; Soto, the former Yale graduate student who is now a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley; Shubhi Sharma, a Ph.D. candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale; Aran Mooney, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Nadege Aoki, a Ph.D. candidate studying biological oceanography in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program.
The symposium will continue on Saturday morning with a workshop exploring interdisciplinary methods of climate education, advocacy, and engagement.
Suttor hopes the event marks just the beginning of a broader effort to combine environmental science with music creation, photography, theater, or performance.
"You can show bar graphs and pie charts forever, but that you can play a piece of music and go straight to people's emotions and intellects is particularly powerful as an educational model," he said. "I think there's tremendous potential. And that's what we want to investigate going forward."
Media Contact
Allison Bensinger
allison.bensinger@yale.edu
* * *
Original text here: https://news.yale.edu/2025/04/24/novel-course-translates-data-natural-world-art
University of Southern California-Viterbi School of Engineering: New Insight Into How the Brain Switches Gears Could Help Parkinson's Patients
LOS ANGELES, California, April 25 -- The University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering issued the following news:
* * *
New Insight into How the Brain Switches Gears Could Help Parkinson's Patients
Biomedical engineering research at USC has unraveled a mystery of motor control that could be a game-changer for disorders like Parkinson's and could aid in the development of bio-inspired systems.
In the high-stakes world of the NBA, we watch in awe as our favorite player seamlessly switches moves in the blink of an eye. A perfect layup is suddenly defended. The shooter changes
... Show Full Article
LOS ANGELES, California, April 25 -- The University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering issued the following news:
* * *
New Insight into How the Brain Switches Gears Could Help Parkinson's Patients
Biomedical engineering research at USC has unraveled a mystery of motor control that could be a game-changer for disorders like Parkinson's and could aid in the development of bio-inspired systems.
In the high-stakes world of the NBA, we watch in awe as our favorite player seamlessly switches moves in the blink of an eye. A perfect layup is suddenly defended. The shooter changescourse mid-air, passing to an open teammate for a corner three.
Humans have a remarkable ability to rapidly switch between different motor actions when life throws us a curveball. You reach to pull open a door but suddenly see you must push to exit. In traffic, you must think fast to change from accelerating to evading or braking to avoid an obstacle. The brain function that helps us switch course has been the subject of extensive scientific debate, with the key question being whether the function the brain uses to help us switch gears is the same one it uses to stop our movement.
A new study from USC's Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering has harnessed a complex mathematical model to reveal that this switch is not an extension of stopping but a unique action that actively suppresses the previous one, enabling a seamless transition to the new target. The research team has also been observing Parkinson's patients playing simple video gaming tasks in order to study the mechanism in action. The research has been published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, shedding new light on how our brains select, stop, and switch between actions.
Lead author Vasileios Christopoulos, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, said that while switching course may seem like an innate process for humans, the complexity of how this is triggered in the brain has been a mystery.
"Traditionally, psychologists believe that switching is an extension of stopping. It's what we call 'go, stop, go.' You go. You stop and you switch to the new action," Christopoulos said. "However, we believe that -- especially when you have to perform something really fast -- your brain doesn't do that. Instead, the new action suppresses your current action without using another mechanism to inhibit it. Stopping and switching are two different cognitive motor processes."
Christopoulos said the function was fundamental to understand from a scientific perspective, given that humans switch and regulate their actions at every moment of the day.
"From a clinical perspective, if we understand how the brain regulates actions, and if we understand how Parkinson's affects these mechanisms, we can create better clinical treatments for patients," Christopoulos said. "There's also the engineering perspective. If we can create a model of the brain that generates actions, then we can create biologically-inspired robotic systems, like autonomous cars, based on the way that the brain actually regulates these actions."
To validate their hypothesis on how the brain switches actions, the research team used a three-pronged approach. Firstly, they built a computational model of the brain, which aimed to simulate how the brain decides which action to perform, how it inhibits an ongoing action, and how it initiates a new action when the context changes. They then used human participants to perform tasks involving reaching, stopping and switching movements. The team compared the participants' motor behavior to the simulated motor patterns generated by the model. Finally, the team has been working with Parkinson's patients at Cedars Sinai and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to see the mechanism in action through patients' recorded brain activity.
Christopoulos' co-author on the paper is the chair of Neurosurgery department at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Nader Pouratian. Shan Zhong, a postdoctoral researcher in the Alfred E. Mann Department, developed the computational models and acquired and analyzed the behavioral data for the study.
A new understanding of the brain that could improve Parkinson's treatments
This new insight into one of the foundational aspects of human motor control could be an essential development for the 90,000 Americans diagnosed with Parkinson's disease each year. Parkinson's patients deal with longer reaction times and delays when they want to initiate movement, compared with those of us who don't live with complex neurological disorders.
This group of patients was of interest to the USC Viterbi research team because their treatment involves deep brain stimulation of the subcortical regions that control motor function -- a prime opportunity to record brain activity to better understand the complex processes of motor regulation in this region.
Christopoulos said that when the patients in the test groups undergo the deep brain stimulation procedure, the surgeon accesses this region via a burr hole, inserting a long electrode that simultaneously allows brain activity to be monitored while they are awake during treatment. The procedure aims to treat Parkinson's-related tremors by stimulating the subthalamic nucleus or STN region, which Christopoulos described as the brain's natural braking system, a crucial component of the switching-gears mechanism.
"This is how our brain stops our actions. For instance, we've all experienced that sensation when you freeze because you're scared or surprised," Christopoulos said. "What happens to this area of the brain where you get scared is that it sends a signal to the brain to immediately stop whatever you're doing. For Parkinson's patients, this area is hyperactive and creates a tremor and bradykinesia (slowed movement)."
"The patients are awake and given a joystick. We show them the screen, and we show them tasks that involve reaching for targets, stopping an action and switching an action from one target to the other," Christopoulos said. "So, the next step is to take this data from the neurosurgeons and analyze it. We're going to see how similar the predictions of our simulated model are to what actually happens in the brain."
Christopoulos said that the work had additional clinical value. Monitoring how Parkinson's patients perform while under deep brain stimulation and how the treatment affects the brain could help clinicians avoid undue side effects and improve treatments for patients.
By harnessing their computational model supported by carefully designed experiments, Christopoulos and his team are continuing to unravel the intricate neural mechanisms that underpin our most essential cognitive functions, paving the way for new discoveries and applications.
The research was supported by an NIH U01 award titled "Modeling and Mapping Human Action Regulation Networks."
* * *
Original text here: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/04/new-insight-into-how-the-brain-switches-gears-could-help-parkinsons-patients/
University of Manchester: 80% of Northern Irish Women First Endured Sexist Behaviour as Children
MANCHESTER, England, April 25 -- The University of Manchester issued the following news release:
* * *
80% of Northern Irish women first endured sexist behaviour as children
Four in five women surveyed in Northern Ireland said their first experience of sexist behaviour or harassment by men happened when they were children, according to a new study.
Kim McFalone, a PhD researcher from The University of Manchester, surveyed 211 women in the country who had experienced staring, sexual comments, touching, catcalling, flashing and other behaviour that made them uncomfortable.
She found that 80%
... Show Full Article
MANCHESTER, England, April 25 -- The University of Manchester issued the following news release:
* * *
80% of Northern Irish women first endured sexist behaviour as children
Four in five women surveyed in Northern Ireland said their first experience of sexist behaviour or harassment by men happened when they were children, according to a new study.
Kim McFalone, a PhD researcher from The University of Manchester, surveyed 211 women in the country who had experienced staring, sexual comments, touching, catcalling, flashing and other behaviour that made them uncomfortable.
She found that 80%said they had first experienced this before the age of 17 - 25% experiencing it before the age of 11, and 55% when aged between 11 and 16 years.
Her study, which is ongoing, also found that almost half (47%) of the 221 women surveyed had, while children or adults, experienced flashing by a man, and 93% had been harassed by men wolf-whistling or cat-calling.
The research was carried out against a background of a gradual increase in violence against women since the end of the Troubles. Sexual violence has increased every year since 1998 and reached the highest recorded level in 2024. Northern Ireland has the second-highest levels of femicide in Europe.
"I found it quite alarming that four out of five respondents first experienced behaviour from a man which made them feel uncomfortable as children, aged 16 or under," Ms McFalone told the British Sociological Association's annual conference in Manchester on Wednesday 23 April.
* * *
"Many interviewees noted they were harassed while they were in their school uniform, including a lot of catcalling from adult men in the street or inappropriate comments from adult men who they knew. There are obvious imbalanced power dynamics here, because their age suggests a vulnerability and lack of confidence to challenge this behaviour."
- Kim McFalone
* * *
"The other circumstance for unwanted behaviour was while they were working in their first part-time job as a teenager, with adult male customers making sexual or otherwise inappropriate comments to them while they were working. A young girl working her first job probably isn't going to feel able to challenge this behaviour or speak to someone about it."
Ms McFalone also carried out interviews with affected women. One told her she was 13 years old when she first was "cat-called in a school uniform" by "fully grown men." Another said: "I worked for a pizza place as my first job - surprisingly the worst sort of male attention I got, which was borderline illegal, was when I was 15."
* * *
Original text here: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/northern-irish-women-first-endured-sexist-behaviour-as-children/
Student Bridge Builders Foster Constructive Dialogue at the Ford School
ANN ARBOR, Michigan, April 25 -- The University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy issued the following news:
* * *
Student Bridge Builders foster constructive dialogue at the Ford School
As the political polarization in America rises, navigating across differences to find common ground--and policy solutions--has never been more important. This semester, four students--Rebecca Coyne (MPP '26), Ella Kinder (BA '25), Breah Marie Willy (BA '26), Adriana Werdin (BA '26)--were selected as the school's first "Bridge Builders" to help foster constructive dialogue at the school.
Led by Jennifer
... Show Full Article
ANN ARBOR, Michigan, April 25 -- The University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy issued the following news:
* * *
Student Bridge Builders foster constructive dialogue at the Ford School
As the political polarization in America rises, navigating across differences to find common ground--and policy solutions--has never been more important. This semester, four students--Rebecca Coyne (MPP '26), Ella Kinder (BA '25), Breah Marie Willy (BA '26), Adriana Werdin (BA '26)--were selected as the school's first "Bridge Builders" to help foster constructive dialogue at the school.
Led by JenniferNiggemeier, managing director of the Ford School's Leadership Initiative, and with support from the Volcker Alliance and the Gottesman Family, the students were empowered with the tools to facilitate meaningful dialogue among their peers using a framework developed by the Constructive Dialogue Institute.
"Employers are looking for employees with leadership and communication skills to navigate differences in perspectives among team members or in client relationships," Niggemeier said. "They need people who know what to do when there is a divide and to not be afraid of having these difficult conversations to get to the best possible outcome."
"We developed this program to further our students' leadership competencies and influence student culture as a whole," Niggemeier continued. "We were impressed by student interest in participating."
Breah Marie Willy (BA '26) jumped at the chance to be part of the program. "I saw the Bridge Builders as a great way to increase my own skills to build bridges within communities and find common ground," she said. "These are really important communication skills to have as a policy professional."
Students were trained in the 5 Principles of Constructive Dialogue, a form of conversation where people with different perspectives try to understand each other in order to live, learn, and work together. Those principles are:
* Let go of winning
* Get curious
* Share stories
* Navigate conflict with purpose
* Find what's shared
The Bridge Builders shared that the tools were useful in everyday encounters with roommates and family, in addition to political conversations with strangers or their own classmates.
"I didn't expect that learning these tools would change my worldview, but it definitely did," Willy said. She shared that before, she might choose not to engage with people with different political perspectives from her own. Now, when she's uncomfortable, she leans into the constructive dialogue framework. "I sometimes catch myself making snap judgments about others, assuming [that I know someone's perspective]. I tell myself to take a step back, converse, and learn their why. Sometimes it might be challenging, but I go back to the principles and ask what they care about to try to find common ground."
The framework also provided a lens in which to apply theoretical reading from class. "Being able to take Values and Ethics alongside [learning about constructive dialogue] really strengthened my learning on both ends. I was able to apply the framework and think more deeply about how to approach other political ideologies. It helped me connect the dots."
The Bridge Builders shared the constructive dialogue framework with others in a variety of ways. They facilitated a school-wide session with students, staff, and faculty, presented their work at the annual Gramlich Showcase, and even won an award at U-M's Year of Democracy's "Democracy's Information Dilemma" showcase. Willy and Werdin also participated in the Big Ten Democracy Summit earlier this semester.
"It's been our job to think about the framework, to practice it, and it's become second nature for us," said Marie Willy. "It's important to extend these opportunities to other students by integrating this framework into the student experience and the cultural norms at the Ford School."
Together, the Bridge Builders developed recommendations for how to incorporate constructive dialogue into new student orientation, coursework, and co-curricular programming.
"Policymaking is an exercise in finding and building upon common ground," noted Professor Jenna Bednar, who leads the Ford School's Resilient Democracies initiative and co-chairs U-M's Year of Democracy and Civic Engagement. "The Bridge Builders can play a vital role in facilitating peer-led workshops to learn about constructive dialogue. It's exciting to see this path toward deepening our school's community norms of mutual respect and our capacity to harness the full potential of our beautifully diverse community."
* * *
Original text here: https://fordschool.umich.edu/news/2025/student-bridge-builders-foster-constructive-dialogue-ford-school
Georgetown Law Offers Tuition Discounts to Affected Federal Lawyers
WASHINGTON, April 25 -- Georgetown University Law Center issued the following news:
* * *
Georgetown Law Offers Tuition Discounts to Affected Federal Lawyers
Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor announced on April 22 that the Law Center would offer tuition discounts on select LL.M. degrees and continuing education programs to to current or recently separated government lawyers.
In a message to the Georgetown Law community, Treanor wrote, "The recent federal actions affecting government employees have created uncertainty and disruption for many individuals in our region and across the government.
... Show Full Article
WASHINGTON, April 25 -- Georgetown University Law Center issued the following news:
* * *
Georgetown Law Offers Tuition Discounts to Affected Federal Lawyers
Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor announced on April 22 that the Law Center would offer tuition discounts on select LL.M. degrees and continuing education programs to to current or recently separated government lawyers.
In a message to the Georgetown Law community, Treanor wrote, "The recent federal actions affecting government employees have created uncertainty and disruption for many individuals in our region and across the government.In March, Interim President Groves shared a message with the Georgetown community highlighting resources for recently separated federal workers, which includes career counseling seminars, scholarships, and professional development opportunities.
"As part of this larger institutional effort, and to help affected federal lawyers, I am pleased to announce that Georgetown Law will also offer support to government lawyers affected by recent federal job reductions."
The offerings include:
A substantially reduced LL.M. tuition rate of 50% to lawyers who have a J.D. from a U.S.-accredited law school who have recently left government service. The reduced tuition rate applies to the following LL.M. degree programs:
LL.M. in Environmental & Energy Law
LL.M. in International Business & Economic Law
LL.M. in National & Global Health Law
LL.M. in National Security Law
LL.M. in Taxation
LL.M. in Technology Law & Policy
The Georgetown Law Office of Executive and Continuing Legal Education (OECLE) is also reducing fees for a variety of its executive and continuing legal education opportunities for those affected by federal reductions in force and grant cancellations.
Upcoming OECLE events include the 2025 Conference on Representing & Managing Tax-Exempt Organizations (TEO) in downtown Washington, DC, which will also be offered on-demand starting in early May. Apply for the TEO Scholarship here.
Additionally, the annual Hotel and Lodging Legal Summit will be held on the Law Center campus on October 16-17 (apply for the HLLS Scholarship here), followed by the Advanced EDiscovery Institute in November.
Interested attendees at all OECLE academic conferences are eligible to apply for discounted registration through the respective event's scholarship application. For more information on upcoming programs and to stay updated on future executive and continuing legal education offerings, visit the OECLE webpage or join the mailing list.
Please visit the Federal Workers Transition Resources website for more information on how to utilize these resources.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/georgetown-law-resources-for-affected-federal-lawyers/
FSU to Celebrate Resilience, Record-breaking Graduating Class at Spring Commencement
TALLAHASSEE, Florida, April 25 -- Florida State University issued the following news:
* * *
FSU to celebrate resilience, record-breaking graduating class at spring commencement
By Amy Farnum-Patronis and Patty Cox
Florida State University will celebrate remembrance, resilience and achievement as its largest graduating class in history receives degrees during Spring 2025 commencement, just days after a campus shooting that claimed two lives and injured six others. Six ceremonies will take place at the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center in Tallahassee on May 2 and 3.
President Richard McCullough
... Show Full Article
TALLAHASSEE, Florida, April 25 -- Florida State University issued the following news:
* * *
FSU to celebrate resilience, record-breaking graduating class at spring commencement
By Amy Farnum-Patronis and Patty Cox
Florida State University will celebrate remembrance, resilience and achievement as its largest graduating class in history receives degrees during Spring 2025 commencement, just days after a campus shooting that claimed two lives and injured six others. Six ceremonies will take place at the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center in Tallahassee on May 2 and 3.
President Richard McCulloughwill preside over five commencement ceremonies and a doctoral hooding ceremony for Ph.D. graduates from all disciplines. About 7,183 students are expected to take part in the six events over two days.
FSU expects to award 8,926 degrees to 8,690 students May 2-4. That includes 6,862 bachelor's degrees, 1,558 master's and specialist degrees and 247 doctoral degrees. The College of Law will confer 259 degrees May 4.
In addition, the College of Medicine will confer 113 degrees May 17.
In the wake of the April 17 campus shooting, the university has increased security measures for all commencement events. Additional police and security personnel will be present to ensure the safety of graduates, families, and guests as our community comes together in both remembrance and celebration.
Here's a look at the speaker lineup for each ceremony:
FRIDAY, MAY 2
9 a.m. - Doctoral Hooding Ceremony
2 p.m. - College of Business
Speaker: Ash Williams
Ash Williams, vice chair for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, is an expert in investment management and longtime leader of the Florida State Board of Administration, where he managed about $195 billion in assets. He is a two-time FSU graduate and serves on the FSU Foundation Board of Trustees. Williams is also a recipient of the FSU Faculty Senate's Mores Torch Award, which celebrates those who uphold the university's traditions.
7 p.m. - College of Arts & Sciences
Speaker: Ken Jones
Ken Jones, a member of the Florida Board of Governors and FSU alumnus, is founder and managing partner of Third Lake Partners, a global investment firm. His career spans law, business and public service -- from advising U.S. Senate leadership to leading the 2012 Republican National Convention. He also serves on the boards of the National Football Foundation, the Florida Council of 100 and Tampa's Straz Center for the Performing Arts.
SATURDAY, MAY 3
9 a.m. - Dedman College of Hospitality, Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship, College of Applied Studies, College of Medicine, College of Motion Picture Arts, College of Social Sciences & Public Policy
Speaker: Mel Stith
Mel Stith is a former FSU College of Business dean and helped launch the Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship. He is known for mentoring students, building strong donor partnerships, and supporting veterans and underrepresented scholars. After leaving FSU, he went on to lead Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management and later served as interim president of Norfolk State University. He currently serves on the board of The Jim Moran Foundation at FSU.
2 p.m. - FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, College of Nursing, Anne Spencer Daves College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences
Speaker: Ricky Polston
Ricky Polston is a former Florida Supreme Court justice and chief justice, who is now a partner at Shutts & Bowen LLP. He served on Florida's highest court for more than 14 years and helped modernize the state court system. Polston taught law at Florida State for 20 years, covering topics like insurance law, appellate practice and accounting for lawyers. Polston earned both his accounting and law degrees from FSU.
7 p.m. - College of Fine Arts, College of Communication & Information, College of Criminology & Criminal Justice, College of Social Work, College of Music
Speaker: Cecile Reynaud
Cecile Reynaud, FSU Hall of Famer and longtime head coach of Seminole Volleyball, led the program from 1976 to 2001 with 635 career wins. Her teams made 13 national tournament appearances and won multiple conference titles. She served as deputy competition manager at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and now serves as vice president for volleyball operations for the Pro Volleyball Federation. Reynaud earned her master's and Ph.D. from Florida State.
Florida State University Panama City will hold its spring commencement ceremony at 6:30 p.m. CT Sunday, May 4, at Tommy Oliver Stadium in Panama City. John Barnhill, FSU associate vice president of Enrollment Management, will address the graduates.
For more information on FSU's spring commencement and live-streaming links, visit commencement.fsu.edu.
* * *
Original text here: https://news.fsu.edu/news/university-news/2025/04/24/fsu-to-celebrate-resilience-record-breaking-graduating-class-at-spring-commencement/
Dartmouth College: Exploring AI's Growing Footprint in Health Care
HANOVER, New Hampshire, April 25 -- Dartmouth College issued the following news:
* * *
Exploring AI's Growing Footprint in Health Care
Dartmouth symposium spotlights innovations serving providers and patients.
As artificial intelligence continues to redefine the possibilities within health care, researchers across Dartmouth are creating and applying these new technologies to drive better outcomes for patients and providers alike.
At the second annual Dartmouth Symposium on Precision Health and AI on April 18, clinicians, medical researchers, and computer scientists convened to explore the
... Show Full Article
HANOVER, New Hampshire, April 25 -- Dartmouth College issued the following news:
* * *
Exploring AI's Growing Footprint in Health Care
Dartmouth symposium spotlights innovations serving providers and patients.
As artificial intelligence continues to redefine the possibilities within health care, researchers across Dartmouth are creating and applying these new technologies to drive better outcomes for patients and providers alike.
At the second annual Dartmouth Symposium on Precision Health and AI on April 18, clinicians, medical researchers, and computer scientists convened to explore theopportunities and complexity that come with modernizing health care in a rapidly evolving digital landscape and to spotlight AI-driven clinical research and innovations by Dartmouth researchers.
"It is really important to recognize that AI tools will augment our existing care models and become a very powerful means for clinicians to advance health care," Duane Compton, dean of the Geisel School of Medicine, said in his welcome address to the audience of over 150 students, researchers, and health providers at the Hanover Inn.
"We have to recognize that there is also a great responsibility to use their power really carefully in the health care setting," Compton cautioned. "We're going to see an enormous change in how we conduct health care using these tools and hopefully for the better to improve outcomes for our patients."
Leading from the forefront by supporting efforts across Dartmouth to build, evaluate, and deploy digital tools that will enhance health care systems is the Center for Precision Health and Artificial Intelligence, launched by Dartmouth in 2023.
"Our last year at CPHAI has been about building a strong foundation, launching collaborative projects, expanding infrastructure, and supporting a diverse community of researchers and students. We are excited to continue shaping the future of ethical, AI-driven health care that is both innovative and inclusive," said CPHAI Director Saeed Hassanpour, who presented the center's annual update and thanked Compton for his invaluable support.
Pranav Rajpurkar, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, delivered the Barry D. Pressman, M.D., D'64, M'65, Visiting Lectureship, the event's first keynote talk.
Rajpurkar, whose research focuses on developing reliable AI systems that can interpret medical data and work alongside clinicians to enhance diagnostic efficiency, presented results from recent studies that advocate a rethink of how AI is combined with physician expertise--not forcing integration, but embracing clear role separation.
Drawing from recent large-scale studies and advances in generalist medical AI systems, he examined promising models where AI and doctors work separately but complementarily, each leveraging their unique strengths.
Navigating the cutting edge of AI and health care
The morning concluded with a panel discussion on the strategies, opportunities, and challenges at Dartmouth and Dartmouth Health for leading AI innovation. Moderated by Michael Whitfield, chair and professor of biomedical data science, the wide-ranging discussion tackled questions about the integration of AI in the classroom, training faculty, students, and staff at the forefront of AI, implementing AI in patient care, and navigating the cutting edge of AI as an institution.
Provost David Kotz '86, the Pat and John Rosenwald Professor in the Department of Computer Science, spoke to the complexity of creating support infrastructure for faculty across the broad range of disciplines at Dartmouth that will likely have different opportunities and challenges in how they adapt to and integrate AI.
Formal training in AI for medical students is "still a work in progress," said Steven Bernstein, professor of emergency medicine and chief research officer at Dartmouth Health. Part of it, the panelists agreed, is the ease with which information can now be accessed, prompting educators to rethink how their courses can be designed to teach students how best to utilize new knowledge resources.
One example is the practice of teaching medical students how to write notes after a patient visit, said Peter Solberg, chief health information officer at Dartmouth Health. Thanks to emerging AI tools, this mainstay of education may be rendered redundant. "We're going to have new documentation tools for medical students that can crank out a note for them. It's a truly brave new world for medical education," he said.
On the other hand, while applications that use virtual and augmented reality tools in medical training seem cool and show promise, it remains to be seen if they prove truly valuable, said Keith Paulsen, MacLean Professor of Engineering at Thayer School of Engineering.
Exploring ways to integrate AI tools into the health care system while maintaining human oversight and decision-making turned the conversation toward concerns about potential misinformation, liability, and the risk of clinicians relying too heavily on AI, especially when it becomes good enough that people might tend to stop checking and validating outputs carefully.
"My biggest fear around the use of AI in health care would be a mistaken impression on the part of health care leaders that AI can allow you to reduce your workforce. The reality, of course, is AI will never be able to deliver care itself. I think there's enormous promise in the careful use of AI for diagnostics and prognostics, but the actual on the ground, at the bedside will always be in the province of human beings," Bernstein said.
For Dartmouth to continue leading from the front, it will be important to identify areas where we have a competitive edge and work across disciplines and create programs that combine the strengths of topic and AI experts, said Susan Roberts, professor of epidemiology and senior associate dean of foundational research at Geisel.
Finally, panelists emphasized the importance of protecting patient data while supporting research and innovation, stressing the need for secure computing facilities and proper data governance. "To that point, Dartmouth and Dartmouth Health have partnered on a joint computing facility that is extremely secure, specifically for computing on highly confidential data that have special security constraints," said Kotz.
AI for clinical impact
The afternoon session was bookended with talks featuring innovations supported by Dartmouth and Dartmouth Health. Katharina Schmolly, a primary care resident physician at Dartmouth Health, showcased zebraMD, a clinical AI assistant that empowers physicians to easily tap into a vast library of rare and genetic disease research to support their clinical practice.
"There is a one in ten risk that you have some kind of rare disease at some point in your lifetime. It's the same as the risk of getting diabetes, and that's because there's over 10,000 rare diseases," said Schmolly, a veteran U.S. Air Force flight medic who founded zebraMD after witnessing the inequality of care that patients with these conditions can experience.
An early study published by Schmolly and her collaborators showed that their algorithm could have potentially reduced diagnostic delays by two years. The zebraMD app aims to assist physicians in timely diagnosis of rare diseases and provide clinical decision support at the point of care.
Pedram Hosseini, AI lead scientist at LavitaAI, a health care AI company that has collaborated with medical researchers at Dartmouth, spoke about their publicly accessible benchmark for evaluating models that answer medical questions.
High-quality evaluation is a critical component of building any robust AI application, especially in a highly sensitive domain like health care. In his talk, Hosseini reviewed the current state of AI model evaluation in the medical domain such as medical AI assistants and medical question-answering systems.
From consumer medical questions on Lavita's Medical AI Assist platform, researchers at Lavita AI and Dartmouth have developed a set of criteria that aim to advance long-form medical question-answering using open models and expert-annotated datasets.
Research frontiers
Nigam Shah, chief data scientist for Stanford Health Care, the day's second keynote speaker, reviewed the use-cases that AI can serve across multiple medical specialties and discussed Stanford Health Care's efforts to shape the adoption of health AI tools to be useful, reliable, and fair so that they lead to cost-effective and sustainable solutions.
Shah drew on examples from multiple specialties, including pathology, cardiology, surgery, and oncology, to analyze the implications of the choice of business model to ensure the use of AI enhances care quality while managing health care costs.
The AI in Health Care: Current Landscape and Research Frontiers panel moderated by Indrani Bhattacharya, CPHAI investigator and assistant professor of biomedical data science, focused on research at the intersection of AI and biomedical research currently underway at Dartmouth Health, Geisel, and Dartmouth.
The diverse panel included Timothy Burdick, associate chief research officer for informatics at Dartmouth Health; David Naeger, chair and professor of radiology at Dartmouth Health; Chair and James W. Squires Professor of Epidemiology Margaret Karagas; Parth Shah, director of genome informatics at Dartmouth Health; and Soroush Vosoughi, assistant professor of computer science.
From using AI to analyze vast quantities of clinical data and developing tools that can reduce physicians' burnout by assisting with routine clinical tasks to developing novel methods to enhance the transparency of these models and address issues like bias, toxicity, and misalignment through mitigation strategies, their research promises exciting additions to the AI toolbox while keeping cognizant of the limitations and potential issues that need to be addressed while integrating these systems into the real world.
"We heard about a wide spectrum of innovations in AI for precision health," Hassanpour said in his closing remarks. "These presentations and discussions underscored the incredible potential of artificial intelligence in medicine and demonstrated that our work in this domain is not merely academic, but can be a tool in the hands of physicians, help patients, and serve as a path forward to improve health care systems in our communities."
* * *
Original text here: https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/04/exploring-ais-growing-footprint-health-care
