Vanderbilt’s NCAA champion bowling team has accepted an invitation from President Joseph R. Biden to attend College Athlete Day Celebration at the White House on Monday, June 12 at 11:30 a.m. ET. The Commodores will join other national champion teams for the presidential recognition, the capstone of an unforgettable year that culminated April 15 in Las Vegas with the program’s third national championship. Vanderbilt will send its entire 10-woman team along with its coaching and bowling support staff. In addition to the White House event, now that the timeline has been established the Commodores will put together other Washington D.C. tour stops over the next day or two. MORE

Vanderbilt University has created the Future of Learning and Generative AI Initiative and appointed members of an advisory board for the initiative. Both will center their efforts around scholarship and opportunities connected to the growing use of nascent artificial intelligence technologies. The purpose of the initiative is to take the opportunity to explore them and to train Vanderbilt students, faculty and staff to leverage the best of this cutting-edge technology. In addition, the initiative will capture and harness the leading scholarship and expertise of Vanderbilt’s data scientists to develop education for faculty and students, seed trans-institutional innovation and inform and engage the data science community. The initiative was commissioned by the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation. MORE 

Representatives from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development visited the American University of Iraq–Baghdad in April and May to advance the collaboration between the institutions on improving Iraqi higher education and strengthening the teacher workforce. In 2022, the institutions were awarded a two-year, $2.5 million grant from the U.S. State Department to design and launch a new college of education at AUIB focused on teacher training and development. The Peabody delegation engaged in workshops . . . to discuss the American style of education and to understand Iraq’s education needs at all levels of schooling and within public, private, and international schools. They also discussed Peabody’s teacher preparation program . . . which will inform the approach to designing AUIB’s college of education. MORE 

As part of the National Science Foundation I-Corps program, a team of researchers led by Vanderbilt University Computer Science Associate Professor Pamela J. Wisniewski, Flowers Family Fellow in Engineering, conducted interviews with 37 social service providers (SSPs) across the United States who work with underprivileged youth to determine what online risks most concern them and if they see value in using AI as a solution for automated online risk detection. The respondents included children, youth and family services workers, mental health therapists, teachers, juvenile justice officers, an LGBTQ+ advocate, a government consultant, and police officers. While there are algorithmic decision-support systems in child welfare agencies to assess offline risk outcomes so caseworkers can support the needs of the children placed in care, this study is the first to address using AI risk detection to help SSPs identify and mitigate online risk experiences of underprivileged youth. MORE

The Nashville Partnership for Educational Equity Research has received a three-year, $650,000 grant from the William T. Grant Foundation to study early postsecondary opportunity offerings, access, and success in Metro Nashville Public Schools and to design solutions for addressing disparities. EPSOs—high school academic offerings that expose students to advanced coursework and build their foundational career skills—are a key lever for increasing postsecondary enrollment and completion. However, across the country, student participation and success in these courses varies widely along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. Nashville PEER, a research-practice partnership between Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development and Metro Nashville Public Schools, will work to identify and address sources of EPSO disparities within the district. MORE

Chris Rowe, executive director for industry collaborations within the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation’s Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization and professor of the practice of engineering management, has been selected for the 2023 Young American Leaders Program at Harvard Business School by Global Action Platform, a local partner for the program, which also collaborates with Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Rowe was among 10 Nashville leaders selected for an intense workshop over the summer with the goal of building a biomedical strategy for the region using cluster models created by Harvard economist Michael Porter. [Additionally, a] stated goal for the program is to develop a dynamic network of Nashville leaders to work across traditional boundaries to create prosperity and inclusive growth for all Nashvillians. MORE

The Vanderbilt University community is invited to attend Juneteenth activities at the National Museum of African American Music from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday, June 19. Vanderbilt has a unique community partnership with NMAAM, which includes joint programming and an archive acquisition fund. The original Vanderbilt-NMAAM partnership, facilitated by Government and Community Relations, includes an initiative to support the purchase of materials for research and exhibition. Funding for the Collections Initiative comes from the Academic Archives Purchasing Fund, a faculty funding program within the Office of the Provost. Collections that have already been acquired through the NMAAM partnership include the papers and works of musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Rissi Palmer. Visiting the museum during Juneteenth is an opportunity to enjoy the diverse offerings in the museum’s galleries and special activities free of charge. MORE