Dear colleagues:
We have been notified by the Office of the Provost of the following update regarding the AI Humanity Initiative:
You and your teams have been extraordinarily successful in the months since January 2022 when the AI.Humanity Initiative to recruit new faculty members was launched. In those intervening 17 months, 7 of our 8 schools nominated 88 recruitment candidates for partial support of salary and startup expenses. From among those of the 88 nominees who remained actively interested in Emory, 59 were chosen for central support and 33 new AI.Humanity colleagues have been successfully recruited into 7 different schools at this writing.
Your great successes at recruiting have exceeded our expectations for the first 18 months of the Initiative. Now, in order to ensure that we have positioned our AI.Humanity infrastructure to properly support the community of scholars your schools have assembled thus far, we want to focus our effort over the coming months on building the physical, digital, and human capital infrastructure needed to support this rapidly growing community. There will also necessarily be important conversations with LGS and the schools about how we scale and support our graduate student population to partner with the new research active faculty members.
This week Provost Bellamkonda shared with the Deans that we will temporarily pause Office of the Provost partial contributions to salary and startup packages for recruits to the AI.Humanity Initiative. This is not a pause on AI.Humanity recruiting – please continue to do so. Rather, we are enacting a temporary pause on central Office of the Provost financial contributions to the broad recruiting activity in the AI.Humanity space to allow a focus on the infrastructure items mentioned above.
Separate from this pause on recruiting AI.Humanity colleagues with intensive infrastructure needs, during the pause we will pursue a small, focused cluster of hires in domains related to "AI Ethics, AI Policy, and Regulatory AI" that are less infrastructure intensive.
Given this information, we will be proceeding with SOM AI research recruitment only if it meets the following criteria:
- Is currently underway and approved through your FY23 budget, and/or
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Has been approved in your SOM FY24 budget target letters
Thank you for your partnership as we move forward.
Carlos
Carlos del Rio, MD
Interim Dean, Emory University School of Medicine
Interim Chief Academic Officer, Emory Healthcare
Leon L. Haley, Jr. MD Distinguished Professor of Medicine
Division of Infectious Diseases, Emory University School of Medicine