Two CHASS Faculty Members Receive NC State Foundation Grants

Communication professor Fernanda Duarte and English professor David Rieder recently received NC State University Foundation Grants for pioneering projects integrating AI and STEM with the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The foundation’s grant program provides funding for new and innovative programs or initiatives that enhance the quality of undergraduate and graduate experiences at NC State. The two College of Humanities and Social Sciences projects were among the top 10 to receive grants for fiscal year 2025.

We caught up with Duarte and Rieder to learn more about their projects.

Fernanda Duarte

Duarte was awarded $50,000 over two years for “Creative and Critical Making for Sustainable Innovation.” She will lead an intercollege, interdisciplinary team of NC State faculty to develop a series of critical and creative technology-making workshops at NC State Libraries in partnership with community members. The initiative will also include course offerings in design and communication.

The other team members are professors Kate Greder and Lesley-Ann Noel from the College of Design; English professor Jason Miller; and Justin Haynes from NC State Libraries.

Duarte said the main goal of the project is to elevate experiences for all undergraduates, especially those majoring in the humanities and social sciences and design. It will do so, she added, in ways that not only enhance students’ understanding of complex concepts but also cultivate skills essential for success in an increasingly interconnected and rapidly evolving world.

The initiative aims to:

• Promote high-impact experiences for undergraduate students prioritizing critical technological literacy, open knowledge and community engagement.
• Establish long-term collaborations with community partners in ways that acknowledge the value of their expertise and connect the collegiate experience to real-life scenarios.
• Incubate and sustain a culture of creative and critical knowledge production through multimodal and interdisciplinary collaboration within CHASS, the College of Design, and NC State Libraries.

For more information about Duarte, visit her faculty page.

David Rieder

Rieder received $29,000 for “Preparing for Futures of Writing with Generative AI and Large Language Models.” As principal investigator, he will work with Ray Zeisz and Michael Babb from the Technology Infrastructure Lab at the William & Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.

The project, Rieder said, comprises a series of hands-on workshops and guest speakers that will offer students in CHASS and other colleges the opportunity to acquire the basic skills, knowledge and perspective needed for a competitive foot forward in the new era of popular computing.

The project’s key goals are to:

• Introduce students to popular computing based on Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) like Chat GPT and Claude 3;
• Teach students how to effectively use common commercial AI tools they can apply to their work and lives in ethical ways;
• Familiarize students with a global approach to computing by focusing on diverse and inclusive approaches;
• Inspire students to find new use cases for LLMs and more broadly AI machine learning to solve problems in the humanities and social sciences;
• Educate students in a series of hands-on workshops on how to use commercial LLMs in an ethically responsible way;
• Expose students to basic programming in a fun but productive environment.

For more information about Rieder, visit his faculty page.

This post was originally published in College of Humanities and Social Sciences.