Spotlighting AI At Tufts in 2025
What does Generative AI mean for the future of learning and teaching at Tufts? New AI tools emerge weekly, each promising to transform how we research, create, and collaborate. Yet for individual students, staff, and faculty, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with every innovation, let alone understand how to leverage these capabilities thoughtfully within our academic community.
This series of interviews with students, staff, and faculty, conducted by Mehek Vora ’27, explores the creative and innovative ways our community is diving into the world of generative AI. Mehek also created a resource “Hub” for students, staff and faculty as part of her project.
- AI at the Extremes: Beyond Utopian Aspirations and Dystopian Fears Jamee Elder, an assistant professor in the philosophy department, specializes in the philosophy of science and technology ethics and has a deep-rooted interest in technology’s evolving role in society.
- Think Critically, Not Just Quickly – Using AI Without Losing Learning As a librarian Jennifer Ferguson, Head of User Experience & Student Success at Tufts Tisch Library, views AI as an extension of a long-standing challenge: How do we teach people to evaluate information in an age where algorithms filter what we see and we don’t always know where the data is coming from?
- Not All AI Wins Make Headlines And That’s Okay! What does it look like when you bring generative AI into a veterinary public health classroom? According to Dr. Meera Gatlin, Assistant Teaching Professor at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, it looks a lot like playful experimentation, pedagogical curiosity, and a whole lot of trial and error.
- When Machado Meets Machine: Exploring AI in the Language Classroom Dr Ester Rincon Calero, Senior Lecturer, Romance Studies is eager to explore AI, challenge it, and reflect on what it means for teaching and learning languages today.
- “You Don’t Just Get AI”: A Tufts Alum on Learning How to Learn With It When Sam Kent Saint Pierre graduated from Tufts in Spring 2024 with a degree in Biochemistry, they left with more than just academic knowledge, they left with an understanding that using AI well isn’t something that comes naturally to everyone. And that’s okay.
- If It’s That Bad at Tic-Tac-Toe: Reflecting on how we may be victims to the WALL-E Theorem? When Jack Davis ’25 first discovered ChatGPT, it wasn’t in a lab or during a lecture—it was just a whisper in the back row of a Tufts computer science class. “Someone behind me said, ‘you can tell this site what your function needs to do, and it’ll just write it.”
- Rethinking AI’s Role in Learning and Human Connection In a world where AI conversations often focus on individual adoption stories, Dr. Carie Cardamone, CELT’s Senior Associate Director, offers something different: a campus-wide perspective on how an entire university community navigates artificial intelligence together.
