IST announces fall 2025 teaching grant awardees

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Four faculty members in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) received awards as part of the Fall 2025 College of IST Teaching Grant Program.

“We congratulate our grant awardees and their collaborators,” said Lisa Lenze, associate dean for undergraduate studies in the College of IST. “Their projects will help us advance undergraduate education priorities of working artificial intelligence into our curriculum, providing more universally designed materials in our courses and supporting research-based teaching practices.”

The program was launched on Sept. 24, and eight proposals from 12 faculty were submitted by the Oct. 15 deadline. The total budget for the program is $30,000, and funds awarded must be spent by June 30, 2026.

Congratulations to the awardees and their collaborators!

• Syed Billah collaborating with Mahir Akgun, "From Cognitive Debt to Cognitive Engagement: A Cross-Course Framework for Teaching with Weaker LLMs"
• Mathias Fonkham collaborating with Carl Cotner, "Forging AI-Resilient Thinkers: A Logic-First Pedagogy Using Prolog & Haskell in Discrete Maths and Software Development"
• Dave Fusco, collaborating with Nick Giacobe and Bryan Ollendyke, "Systematic AI Integration in Cybersecurity Education: A Multi-Framework Assessment with Automated Course Generation"
• Dhananjay Singh, "AiChatbot: Multimodal and Integrated Learning Assistant for Personalize Evaluation"
• Amulya Yadav, "Creating New Instructional Materials for DS 402: Socially Responsible AI"