This new project explores the impact and opportunities precipitated by artificial intelligence in graduate education across the various disciplines of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, promoting AI literacy, and spurring innovative research and pedagogy.
The initiative will provide a resource repository, solicit and curate contributions from the community, host workshops and speakers, produce a bi-weekly newsletter, and aggregate these resources as a public good for the community.
Project Members
Jonathan Woon
Jonathan Woon is Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Professor of Political Science in the Dietrich School. He has long been fascinated by chatbots and is optimistic that AI technologies can be used positively if approached responsibly and with intention. Having modest coding skills, AI assistance made it considerably easier to overhaul his website and to create web apps demonstrating analytical concepts in political science (such as candidate competition).
Melissa Lenos
Melissa Lenos is Senior Director of Graduate Advising and Engagement for the Humanities, as well as PI on the True Co-equal x Transformative Collaborations (TC²) Seed project. Her B.A. in English and M.A. in English, Critical and Cultural Studies are from the University of Pittsburgh and her Ph.D. in Mass Media and Communication is from Temple University. Melissa's primary research areas are narratology and media pedagogy; her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, In Media Res, and Antenna. She is co-author (with Michael Ryan) of An Introduction to Film Analysis: Technique and Meaning in Narrative Film and (with Kevin L. Ferguson) of the forthcoming Generation X: The Popular Culture that Defined the MTV Generation. Melissa is available for one-on-one appointments and to visit departments to speak about project opportunities.
Marcus Landas
Marcus Landas is the Project Coordinator for Humanities Engage, where he provides project management, communication, and administrative support. He has over 12 years of experience in project management in the Americas, Oceania, Asia and EMEA. Marcus’ project delivery background spans the fields of Information Technology Service Management, Telecommunications and Healthcare.
He was most recently in Washington D.C., where he managed projects for George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. These projects focused on process optimization within the university’s healthcare system and required extensive collaboration with university resources and their partners.
Paula Orozco Espinel
Paula is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History, specializing in the history of women and sexuality in Latin America and the United States. Her dissertation research focuses on the role played by Colombian women in global birth control policies and reproductive rights activism during the second half of the 20th century. As a member of GAINS, she is committed to promoting fair engagement with AI tools and encouraging diverse students to use them mindfully, while also raising awareness of their biases and limitations.
Rose Gatfield-Jeffries
Rose (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, specializing in the philosophy of biomedical sciences and feminist philosophy of science. She holds interests in the integration of AI tools into scientific reasoning and medical knowledge production. Within the GAINS community, she is hoping to explore and advocate for the responsible use of AI in university classrooms, with an emphasis on preserving the integrity and creativity central to higher education in the humanities.
Leila Nilipour
Leila (she/her) is a first-year graduate student in History at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in the intersections of gender, honor, and reputation among Central American women in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Before beginning her graduate studies, she worked as a journalist in Panama, co-founding Indomables, the country’s first narrative non-fiction podcast, which became a multi-award-winning project. She also worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, translating scientific research into bilingual communications materials.
As a member of GAINS, Leila is interested in exploring how the underrepresentation of women's History in open knowledge platforms may influence the biases of generative AI systems.
Previous Interns
Addison Eldin
Addison is a doctoral candidate in the English Composition Program. Her dissertation and teaching have both engaged with generative AI and its effects on writing, writing pedagogy, and other domains of humanistic inquiry such as the study of narrative. As part of the GAINS team, she looks to connect her work to the broader community of people at Pitt exploring the applications and ramifications of AI in their own research and teaching.
Bowei Ouyang
Bowei is a doctoral candidate from Department of Mathematics. His projects and researching interests focus on dynamic systems, navigational algorithms with reinforcement leaning and machine learning classifications algorithms. As a member of the GAINS team, he looks to contribute his knowledge to the people of Pitt community and help explore the applications of AI technology to enhance their own research.
David Lo
David Hsu-tai Lo is a first year MFA student in The Writing Program. He is a poet, translator, and photographer. His poetry concerns itself in how the boundaries of identity and imagination are prescribed through inheritances of visuality, sovereignty, and possibility. As a member of GAINS, he is excited to be in community with others concerned and curious about the proliferation of engagement with AI tools in the use of artmaking and in the Humanities.
Daniel Crawford
Daniel is in the final semester of his MA in Linguistics, where he studies language structure, cognition, and computational approaches. He leverages techniques from a variety of disciplines to learn about language. He is interested in the why’s and how’s of AI models and the aspects of human externalization in the models. He also holds MS and ME degrees.
Mehul Bhushan
Mehul is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Rhetoric, specializing in AI and Communication Policy Studies. Her dissertation research focuses on how policymakers in the United States contend with multiple actors such as big technology companies, civil society activists, and academia in making policies that ensure the development of fair and trustworthy AI. As a GAINS member, she is committed to promoting AI literacy and generating public-facing conversations around AI.