New trustees appointed to SOU Ashland board

Six trustees appointed and confirmed to SOU Board

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(Ashland, Ore.) – Two new and four continuing members have been appointed by Gov. Tina Kotek and confirmed today by the Oregon Senate to serve on the Board of Trustees of Southern Oregon University.

The new trustees are former Oregon State Rep. Peter Buckley and Christopher Geryak, an SOU junior and former student body vice president.

“The Board of Trustees is excited to welcome these dedicated individuals to SOU,” said Sheila Clough, the board’s chair. “Peter’s extensive legislative and community leadership, both locally and in the state, paired with Christopher’s proven commitment to students and leadership at SOU, will provide valuable insight as we navigate the future of higher education in our region.

“We appreciate Gov. Kotek’s appointment and the legislature’s confirmation of these leaders,” Clough said. “Their service ensures that SOU remains deeply connected to the needs of our students and the southern Oregon community.”

Returning to serve their second four-year terms as trustees are Debra F.J. Lee, Christina (Medina) Kruger and Elizabeth (Liz) Shelby. Their renewed terms will begin July 1 and run through June 30, 2030. Hala Schepmann, a professor of Chemistry, has been reappointed and confirmed to a two-year term as a faculty trustee, ending June 30, 2028. Trustees are limited to serving two consecutive full terms.

“SOU is vital to the success of our region,” said new trustee Peter Buckley. “I look forward to helping in any way I can to support our students, staff, faculty and fellow board members as we work for a brighter future.”

Student trustee Christopher Geryak echoed the sentiment of service. “I am pleased to join SOU’s Board of Trustees and provide my insight and knowledge to help SOU thrive and succeed,” Geryak said.

The new trustees’ terms will begin February 20. Buckley was appointed to a partial term and then a full term that will end June 30, 2030, and Geryak’s term runs through June 30, 2027.

Trustees are gubernatorial appointees, subject to confirmation by the Oregon Senate. The board consists of as many as 11 at-large trustees serving four-year terms, with additional positions reserved for up to three SOU students – two undergraduates (one voting, one non-voting), a faculty member and a non-faculty staff member, each serving two-year terms. The university president serves in a non-voting, ex officio capacity on the board, bringing total membership to 17.

New trustees

Peter Buckley
Buckley served for 12 years in the Oregon House of Representatives (2005-17), representing south Jackson County. During his tenure, he served for eight years as House Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Ways & Means, the legislature’s budget-writing committee. After leaving the legislature, Peter was hired to lead Southern Oregon Success, a collaboration of all levels of education, health care, human services, public safety and workforce development in Jackson and Josephine counties, dedicated to working across all sectors to help children, families and communities thrive. Prior to his legislative service, Peter worked for 22 years as a director, actor, writer, producer, administrator and teacher for west coast regional theatres, including six years as the director of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre.

Christopher Geryak
Geryak is a junior at Southern Oregon University, majoring in business administration with a concentration in management and a minor in education. Following his service as SOU’s student body vice president, Christopher expanded his academic focus to include education, reinforcing his commitment to student advocacy and the importance of higher education across Oregon. During his time at SOU, he has held seven volunteer and employment positions and has been actively involved in numerous student organizations. His experiences in student government, student life and campus services have provided him with a well-rounded understanding of the university and its impact on students.

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Civics course by SOU Ashland's Prakash Chenjeri

SOU civics course included on select national list

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(Ashland, Ore.) — A Southern Oregon University Course – “Civicus: Advancing Civic Education” – has been recognized as a national resource and included on a select list of such classes by the Hoover Institution’s Alliance for Civics in the Academy at Stanford University.

The Civicus course at SOU – created and taught by Philosophy professor Prakash Chenjeri – explores how citizenship evolved and how it is practiced as a commitment to the common good. Students study democracy’s philosophical roots and development, along with contemporary challenges.

Current students in the class are enthusiastic about its takeaways.

“Civicus, like no other class, has made me realize the lack of engagement I’ve put into my community and has motivated me to try to change that within myself and my peers,” student Drew Wright said.
“This class has given students like me the opportunity to learn how to understand our democracy, be a part of political discussions, and argue with reason,” said Kloie Watkins-Simpkins. “The impact that I feel I can have on our society and nation has grown immensely since taking this class, I will forever push to have it be a part of our education system.”

The term “civicus” derives from the Latin word “civis,” whose present-day meaning is “citizen.” The Latin term signified both membership in a political community and the duties, privileges and shared outcomes associated with that community.

“Reclaiming this root for our own time reminds us that citizenship is not a passive condition but an active practice of engagement, deliberation and care for the common good,” says a syllabus of the SOU course on the Alliance for Civics in the Academy (ACA) website.

“In the 21st century, the idea of Cīvicus takes on renewed urgency,” it says. “Democracies today face strains from polarization, erosion of trust and disruptive technologies that challenge our ability to discern truth and act collectively. Against this backdrop, Cīvicus calls us back to the essence of citizenship: to be stewards of democratic life through informed participation, critical reasoning and meaningful dialogue.”

SOU’s Civicus is one of 39 courses at universities and other institutions nationwide ­– and the only one in Oregon – that are listed on the Alliance for Civics in the Academy website. The SOU course is supported in part by gifts to the Cīvicus Project Fund of the SOU Foundation. Donations help pay for guest lecturers, instructional materials and opportunities for students to study, observe and engage in civic processes and civil discourse.

The ACA is a part of the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank located at Stanford University and Washington, D.C., and led by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. The Hoover Institution furthers ideas that promote economic opportunity while safeguarding peace.

“Civicus made me realize that civic education is essential now—not just at the university level, but across all stages of education,” SOU student Vanessa Salazar said. “By critically examining my beliefs and learning to engage respectfully with diverse viewpoints, this course strengthened my skills as a thoughtful, informed, and responsible citizen in ways I didn’t know I was capable of.”

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Student fellows sought for leadership program at SOU Ashland

SOU seeking student fellows for new Community Resilience and Leadership program

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University’s Institute for Applied Sustainability is recruiting students for its new Community Resilience and Leadership Student Fellows program – an opportunity for a cohort of 15 of students to help create meaningful solutions to urgent challenges facing local communities. The one-year fellowship – a cornerstone of the institute’s Living Laboratory concept – offers a total of 12 credit hours plus monetary stipends to students who are selected for the fellowships.

The Community Resilience and Leadership (CRL) fellows program is an opportunity for students to participate in hands-on projects through field-based learning and close partnerships with a variety of local organizations. It is built on the idea of the Living Laboratory – a classroom formed by partnerships between SOU, the southern Oregon region and community organizations.

“CRL is not a class you sit through,” the program’s website says. “It’s an experience you step into.”

The program consists of a spring Local Innovation Lab course that meets two hours per week and offers four academic credit hours; a summer Field School that offers eight credit hours and meets for six weeks beginning in early August; and fall options that include internships, peer mentoring and capstone research projects. The student fellows will receive $1,000 stipends for participating in the spring Local Innovation Lab and $3,000 stipends for the summer Field School.

“The experience of meeting with community partners, exploring ambiguities and personal values with my peers, and the helpful and insightful guidance of the instructors is invaluable,” said one student who has completed the Local Innovation Lab course. “I believe the lab attracts students who are curious, full of life, and willing to learn how to ride the waves of ambiguity and uncertainty.”

Another student said the lab is “not just learning about different tools and ways to improve yourself, but also of ways to impact and affect other individuals in the community, beginning with yourself.”

Students from any major who are interested in the CRL fellows program can attend an information session from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 26, in Room 319 of the Stevenson Union. Lunch will be provided, and questions about the program are welcome. Applications to be part of the 2026 cohort – which begins this spring term – can be submitted online, with a priority deadline of Feb. 2.

The Institute for Applied Sustainability envisions SOU as what it calls a “Living Laboratory,” in which students can turn ideas into action, and theory into real-world solutions. Students use real challenges, data and partners to test ideas, solve problems and create impacts in their community – tackling issues such as energy, water, food systems, forests and community well-being.

The CRL Student Fellows Program, an integral part of the Living Laboratory model, has grown out of the Local Innovation Lab project – which started as a response to local problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the September 2020 Almeda Fire. SOU economics professor Bret Anderson and several members of the local community created the lab in partnership with the university.

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Older adult living project paused at SOU Ashland

Plans paused for older adult living community at SOU

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University’s project to create an older adult living community on its Ashland campus has been paused after one of the two companies being considered as partners with the university withdrew its response to SOU’s request for proposal. SOU will take time to consider what potential partnerships may look like before possibly issuing a new request for additional proposals from private developers.

University President Rick Bailey said the delay will allow more time to evaluate the long-term effects of a facility that will be a part of SOU and the Ashland community for generations.

“We have learned a lot in the last several months about both the challenges and opportunities of this project,” President Bailey said. “We acknowledge that this would likely be a 100-year project, and want to make sure we explore all our possibilities to optimize the benefits to our students, the university and our region.”

Medford-based Pacific Retirement Services, which was in discussions and performing initial due diligence with SOU regarding the project, notified the university this month that a decision has been made to focus capital and resources elsewhere. PRS emphasized that it intends to maintain its close relationships with SOU, including education of health care staff and an on-site Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) program at its Rogue Valley Manor in Medford.

President Bailey said the campus community remains excited about the potential for a public-private partnership to develop the 4.3-acre site previously occupied by the Cascade Complex of residence halls. He said that placing the preliminary discussions on hold will enable the university to explore additional development options for the property.

Developers from around the country were invited last January to submit project proposals for an older adult living community – an entrepreneurial opportunity to forge a synergy between the facility’s residents, traditional SOU students, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at SOU and the university. The project’s goal is to generate long-term revenue for SOU while supporting the university’s commitment to lifelong learning.

Older adult communities are a rare but growing feature on university campuses across the U.S., and an SOU facility would be the first in Oregon – capitalizing on southern Oregon’s reputation as a retirement mecca with a blend of educational, cultural and recreational opportunities.

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New book for educators by SOU Ashland's Renee Owen

New book suggests transformation of education and educators

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(Ashland, Ore.) — A new book by Renee Owen, an associate professor in the SOU School of Education, sold out on Amazon almost immediately after it was published but is now back in stock and getting enthusiastic reviews from educators nationwide.

The book, “Becoming a Transformative Leader from the Inside Out,” describes an educational model through which both teachers and their schools are transformed to more positively influence society. It is intended for both new and veteran educators interested in changes that benefit students, teachers and their communities.

Owen, who coordinates the Principal Administrator Licensure program at SOU, co-wrote the new book with Christine Y. Mason, an educational psychologist who is the founder and senior scholar at the Center for Educational Improvement, a non-profit dedicated to heart-centered learning. The book was published in November by Bloomsbury Academic Publishing.

“They not only create a vision of a new model for the world of educators and education, but they also present us with a manual for accomplishing it with humor, hope, real-world experience, wisdom and courage,” Jean Houston, the chancellor of Meridian University and co-founder of the Human Potential Movement, said in the book’s foreword.

“There is no question that Renee Owen and Chris Mason have envisioned, designed and are helping to create a world of joyfully effective, whole-bodied, whole-hearted, whole-systems education, from the inside out,” Houston said. “What a wonder and gift these authors have given us.”

Owen said she wrote the book with students from SOU’s Principal Administrator Licensure program in mind, but “it would also be a great book for anyone teaching or administrating in higher ed.” In fact, Owen shared in her book the story of how SOU President Rick Bailey took a transformative approach to addressing a flawed fiscal structure when he came to the university four years ago.

“I had never met anyone so gregarious, yet thoughtful and authentic in their com­munication,” Owen said. “Rick organized a series of town hall meetings and truly listened to everyone’s concerns. He answered every email. He went out of his way to meet students, attend faculty gatherings and get to know everyone personally.

“Most importantly, he had a practice of total transparency. Every major decision he made, no matter how painful, he announced it, provided the rationale behind it and offered a compassionate response to those who were affected negatively.”

The book’s authors share a variety of stories about school leadership and how to teach meaningful lessons. The book is based on neuroscience, systems thinking and holistic philosophy, and intended for use in both leadership courses and professional development – with ideas that can change lives, improve relationships and impact school or communities.

Owen earned her bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in Educational Leadership at the University of Colorado, Denver, and a doctorate in Organizational and Adult Learning and Development from Columbia University Teachers College. Mason, who received her doctorate in Educational Psychology from Ohio State University, is an assistant clinical professor in the department of psychiatry in Yale University’s school of medicine.

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SOU grad's Cold Connect cooler keeps vaccines cool

SOU grad’s beverage cooler idea pivots toward humanitarian use

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Build a better beer cooler, and you just may save lives.

Mark Morrison set out to do that – build a tech-heavy, personal-use cooler to keep a beverage cold – when he realized that his invention may have more humanitarian applications. The project quickly morphed into Cold Connect – an internet-enabled, solar-powered cooling and monitoring cap that screws onto standard vacuum-insulated hydration flasks to create a delivery system capable of transporting heat-sensitive vaccines to remote regions of the world.

“At some point it clicked that this technology could save lives instead of just saving my afternoon,” said Morrison, who grew up in Hawaii and then moved to Ashland to earn his bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science & Policy at Southern Oregon University. It was when he returned to SOU last year to earn a certificate in environmental communication that his thirst inspired an invention that may save both lives and money.

“I am a problem solver at heart; I simply cannot let a challenge go unanswered,” Morrison said. “When I discovered the magnitude of this issue, I knew I had to tackle it. I immediately began pouring my technical and creative energy into a solution.

“The need is massive, especially as international aid organizations face funding crunches,” he said. “Right now, nearly half of all life-saving vaccines destined for remote locations in the global south go to waste due to temperature excursions. That represents $34 billion a year in wasted inventory, but the statistic that keeps me up at night is that 1.5 million children die every year from diseases we already know how to prevent.”

Morrison, who currently works as an IT Infrastructure Specialist with the city of Ashland and Ashland Fiber Network, says he has always been a tinkerer and builder at heart. He considers Professor Erik Palmer of the SOU Communication Department to be his mentor, and he listened when Palmer encouraged him to pitch his latest invention, first at an “Innovation Jam” for a class and then at Raider Demo Day, an opportunity for SOU students to showcase business ideas, win prizes and potentially advance to other competitions – which Morrison did.

His idea took first place at last spring’s SOU Business Venture Tournament, a campuswide entrepreneurship contest, and then won the Visionary Award at InventOR – a state-sponsored, college-level competition that encourages students to take their inventions from concept to reality. It was the first-ever win for an SOU project in the contest for universities throughout Oregon, and the results included a short YouTube documentary that is now being used to generate support.

Along the way, as designs for prototypes were fine-tuned, Morrison brought friend and fellow SOU alumnus Elijah Anderson-Justis onboard to serve as the project’s lead architect. Mickey Fishback joined the team as operations manager, and Cold Connect was registered in July with the Oregon Corporation Division.

Morrison credits the InventOR competition for propelling his project from a business concept to a commercial and humanitarian enterprise.

“It’s much larger than a Shark Tank scenario,” he said. “It began as an intensive bootcamp where they brought us to Portland for training and connected us with mentors and subject matter experts. The final competition involved pitching to over 200 people and a panel of 30 judges, followed by a three-hour booth session.

“It wasn’t just a pitch; it was a pressure test for the entire business model.”

There were what Morrison called “Mr. Miyagi moments,” referring to the instructor from the “Karate Kid” movie franchise, and his meticulous “wax on, wax off” exercises – in this case, teaching that invention involves more than building a clever device.

“You have to focus on customer discovery, so you don’t end up with a solution in search of a problem,” Morrison said.

The active, intelligent and solar-powered Cold Connect units are designed to replace passive ice chests – which too often fail before reaching their destinations – by maintaining specific temperatures without relying on ice or the power grid. The invention will ensure that medicine is as potent when delivered to remote locations as when it left the factory.

Morrison and his team are currently finishing work on their “Revision 4” prototype, designed to achieve the World Health Organization’s Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) certification – a standard that prequalifies health care items such as “cold chain equipment” as products reliable for use by United Nations agencies and member states.

“We’ve moved beyond the ‘science fair’ stage and are now producing hardware that is getting closer to industrial-grade, field-ready tools,” Morrison said.

The Cold Connect Team is also seeking investors and partners, through conversations with humanitarian organizations including the Gates Foundation, Floating Doctors and the Oregon BioScience Incubator. Morrison can be reached at mark@cold-connect.org.

“We are still a startup, and we need subject matter experts, connections to NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and funding partners to help us bridge the gap between a working prototype and a global solution,” Morrison said.

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Dee Anne Everson appointed to Board of Trustees at SOU Ashland

United Way CEO appointed to SOU Board of Trustees

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Dee Anne Everson, the CEO and executive director of United Way of Jackson County, has been appointed by Gov. Tina Kotek and confirmed today by the Oregon Senate to serve on the university’s Board of Trustees. She will begin her service to the board on November 20.

Everson will complete the unexpired term of Bill Thorndike, who passed away unexpectedly in February. That term will expire next June 30, and Everson will then begin her own full, four-year term on the board.

“It is an honor to join Southern Oregon University’s Board of Trustees, and especially humbling to be following in the footsteps of Bill Thorndike,” Everson said. “I believe that my experiences will be of value to the board, and I look forward to helping guide the university through an important period in its long and rich history.”

Everson has served as the CEO and executive director of United Way of Jackson County since 1996. Under her leadership, the local United Way has launched programs including Day of Caring, WILL (Women Living Leadership), the Meth Task Force, CAN (Child Abuse Network) and Tomorrow Needs You – a southern Oregon suicide prevention and mental wellness campaign. She previously spent 13 years in the corporate financial sector, then transitioned to nonprofits as economist and research manager for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce.

Recognitions since she joined United Way of Jackson County include being named one of Oregon’s 50 great leaders by Oregon Business Magazine, the Social Empowerment Award from the Black Alliance for Social Empowerment (BASE), and the Nonprofit Outstanding Corporate Citizen Award from the Medford/Jackson County Chamber of Commerce.

Everson – who received the Executive Nonprofit Leaders Certificate from Stanford University – is a member of the International Women’s Forum and serves on the boards of the Oregon Community Foundation, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, NewSpirit Village and the United Ways of the Pacific Northwest. She also serves on several committees, including the Jackson County Threat Assessment Committee, Wellness Court Advisory Committee and BHEACON Leadership Team. She is a convener for the Governor’s Regional Solutions Committee for Southern Oregon.

Everson has won two EMMY Awards for public service programming and regularly lectures on leadership and the nonprofit sector.

“On behalf of my colleagues on the SOU Board of Trustees, I am very happy to welcome Dee Anne to the board and to the SOU community,” said Sheila Clough, the board chair. “Her expertise and public service portfolio speak volumes – her leadership and wealth of experiences will undoubtedly serve the university well.”

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Design Patterns and AI: Computer Science evolves at SOU

Design Patterns and AI: Computer Science evolves at SOU

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(Ashland, Ore.) — A new “Design Patterns” course in Southern Oregon University’s Computer Science program leans on artificial intelligence to perform coding tasks, allowing students to focus on the big picture and serve as architects rather than carpenters.

The course – an upper-division elective intended primarily for Computer Science majors – reflects an ongoing shift toward AI in software engineering by taking a deeper look at the structure of software, teaching students how to recognize recurring problems in programming and apply reusable solutions, or patterns.

“The main difference (from other coding courses) is the students aren’t doing much coding at all in this class,” said David Pouliot, an SOU associate professor of Computer Science and instructor for the course. “Instead they are designing the code, which is more like creating the blueprints and defining the functionality of the different pieces of software and how they interact.

“This approach lets different teams work independently, makes it easy to upgrade parts without breaking the whole system and keeps complex software manageable,” he said.

The Design Patterns course – offered for the first time this fall – acknowledges that tools such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot have become capable of generating short, functional pieces of computer code, and the role of computer scientists is moving from line-by-line implementation toward a higher-level of thinking.

AI can quickly generate snippets of code, but it still struggles with things that come more naturally to humans, such as design. Programmers still need the same core engineering skills to use AI effectively, as artificially generated code often contains bugs, logic errors or vulnerabilities that inexperienced developers may not recognize.

“Students analyze how programs are structured rather than the nitty-gritty details of the program,” Computer Science student Felicity Johnson said of the Design Patterns course. “You can think of it like how an architect creates blueprints for a building, but the builder actually makes the building itself.

“It teaches students how to structure software so that it’s flexible, efficient and easier to maintain.”

Students in Design Patterns learn how to think about structure, choosing between composition and inheritance, where to apply abstraction and how to design programs for scalability and flexibility. Those are decisions that require judgement, creativity and a good understanding of software architecture – traits that even the most advanced AI tools today don’t possess.

The course is intended to help students learn how to use AI as an assistant and increase their programming productivity. The field is moving in the direction of developers spending more time at the structural level, making design decisions and defining interfaces, while AI handles more of the low-level and repetitive work.

“First, they get experience designing large projects – something they don’t normally get until they have graduated and been in the industry for a while,” Pouliot said. “The other thing I hope is that this class will help prepare students for changing roles.

“It should help prepare students for any class where the students complete larger projects – primarily our capstone sequence where groups of students work on a real project over multiple quarters.”

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SOU’s Small Business Development Center to close

SOU’s Small Business Development Center to close

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University’s Small Business Development Center, which has served Rogue Valley businesses for 41 years, will close to the public at the end of December after the university and state of Oregon were unable to reach agreement on a plan to maintain U.S. Small Business Administration funding for the center.

SOU has historically augmented the federal funding, but the university’s plan to rebuild itself as a smaller, more resilient institution reduces its ability to help pay for all services. The university submitted a joint proposal with Rogue Community College to combine SOU’s Medford-based Small Business Development Center with RCC’s Josephine County-serving SBDC, but the state office that coordinates Oregon’s 18 SBDCs rejected that plan.

“We definitely knew that the budget environment would mean less capability to subsidize the SBDC’s operations, but we did in earnest work with the state to find a creative solution to continuing services,” SOU President Rick Bailey said. “We went back-and-forth with the state in our effort to create a single center for Jackson and Josephine counties – despite our budget issues – but ultimately were unable to move our proposal forward.”

More than 11,000 entrepreneurs and small business operators have tapped the services offered by SOU’s SBDC, which is located in the RCC/SOU Higher Education Center in Medford. The center works closely with SOU’s School of Business to teach and advise students and collaborate with faculty. It offers help to anyone who operates or is planning to open a business and also runs a Market Research Institute that can offer in-depth, applied market research to SBDC clients.

“The Rogue Valley owes a sincere debt of gratitude to all the amazing staff at the SOU SBDC and Market Research Institute for their service to our community and our region,” President Bailey said. “They have been role models of dedicated, heart-centered service.”

Small Business Development Centers are operated by each of Oregon’s 17 community colleges. SOU’s SBDC in Medford is the only one managed by a university, after Eastern Oregon University closed its SBDC office a year ago. Oregon’s SBDC offices are part of a national network and provide advising, training, online courses and resources for businesses throughout the state.

SBDC offices in Oregon are associated with both the U.S. Small Business Administration and Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency.

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SOU Ashland's Chandler Campbell and Jacob Nowack present research on artificial intelligence

Graduate and current student present SOU research at national conference

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University computer science graduate Chandler Campbell and current student Jacob Nowack attended a conference of research software engineers in Philadelphia last month to showcase their work on a pair of closely related projects that hinge on the use of artificial intelligence to simplify and organize highly complex research tasks.

Campbell presented a paper on his study of tacit knowledge in research settings – gathering, storing and retrieving the unspoken practices of academic teams that sometimes are lost when a project is disrupted or ends – and Nowack spoke about using a tacit knowledge tool to help UCLA astronomers rapidly expand their efforts to survey billions of distant galaxies. Both Campbell and Nowack work on their AI projects under Bernadette Boscoe, an SOU assistant professor of computer science who builds and researches infrastructures and tools to help domain scientists do their work.

Campbell and Nowack were presenters at the third annual national conference of the US Research Software Engineer Association, an organization that supports those who use expertise in programing to advance research. The association is a project of a California-based nonprofit.

“I got to meet a lot of really interesting people from all over the country, and learned more about cutting-edge AI technologies and software development techniques which I think will help me a lot in my future career,” Nowack said, describing his experience at the conference.

“I was a bit nervous initially going into it, but when the time came I had a great time presenting,” he said.

Nowack’s project is intended to help astronomers who measure the distances to far-flung galaxies so they can better understand how the universe has expanded and evolved. Spectroscopy, the traditional method of measuring those distances, is expensive and time-consuming.

“Our project uses machine learning to solve this problem,” Nowack said. “We trained an AI model on approximately 286,000 galaxies whose distances were already measured using spectroscopy. Once trained, (the AI model) can estimate distances over 1,000 times faster than traditional spectroscopy, making large-scale cosmic surveys practical.”

His work with the UCLA astronomers is based on a Large Language Model (LLM) of artificial intelligence that is used to archive the group’s protocols.

Boscoe’s research group at SOU has developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system – an AI framework that pairs an LLM with an information retrieval system to improve accuracy and relevance of resulting data. Her research has received grants over the past two years from the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and Boscoe has worked with Campbell to build the project’s RAG-LLM tool – AquiLLM, which was the subject of Campbell’s presentation at last month’s conference.

“Our work on AquiLLM is part software development and part social research,” he said. “We’re investigating the potential for an AI-enabled knowledge repository to improve how academic research groups function.”

Tacit knowledge – which can include informal practices such as notes, meeting transcripts and group communications – can sometimes be lost when participants come and go from academic research groups.

“Our hope is that if we can ingest enough informal communication into the system, and give an LLM access to that information, it will be able to help group members access the tacit knowledge of the group,” Campbell said. “To do this, we’ve written a custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation tool (AquiLLM) specifically for researchers. We have a beta version deployed for astronomers at UCLA, and we’re currently working on fleshing out more functionality.”

The Philadelphia conference included representatives from several national research labs and dozens of top research universities, and Campbell said many were thinking about the same issues that his work addresses.

“I got a lot of valuable feedback on our work, and got to see how other researchers are trying to use AI to solve adjacent problems,” he said. “I was very proud to be there in the mix, representing SOU.”

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