Fordham has appointed career AI strategist Chalapathy Neti into a new Assistant Vice President (AVP) of Enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) position, per a university-wide email announcement by the Office of Information Technology (IT) on Feb. 9.
The new AVP will be responsible for creating a unified, comprehensive AI strategy and multi-year plan in line with the university’s goals and principles of ethical governance. Neti will co-design practical AI applications for students, faculty and staff alongside other Fordham experts, faculty and ethics leaders. What these applications will look like specifically remains to be seen.
Neti said that his goal for practical AI applications “focuses on optimizing experiences to best serve our community of students, faculty, and staff,” using the Jesuit principle of cura personalis as a “lens.”
“Ethical AI is synonymous with Responsible AI, and involves ensuring we remain committed to serving our students and community with integrity and thoughtful implementations,” Neti said. “Our goal is to serve our community with systems that are fair, secure, and profoundly human-centric.”
Over the coming year, we will transition from isolated AI experiments to a unified institutional strategy. Anand Padmanabhan, Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Neti added that he believes AI serves its “highest purpose when applied to the ‘public good,’ namely education and healthcare.” Fordham, he said, is uniquely positioned to establish itself as a leader in AI policies.
“Fordham offers a unique opportunity to lead by example, demonstrating how a premier institution can implement responsible AI to shape the minds of future leaders who will eventually oversee these technologies in their own careers,” Neti said.
Anand Padmanabhan, vice president and chief information officer, said that the position will help cohere what have so far been isolated AI-related initiatives undertaken by the university.
“Over the coming year, we will transition from isolated AI experiments to a unified institutional strategy. Our priorities include establishing a formal governance framework, auditing current projects for scalability, and engaging with campus stakeholders to identify high-impact opportunities that will shape our long-term AI roadmap,” Padmanabhan said.
Regarding AI governance, the university must ensure AI is integrated thoughtfully and ethically through a centralized lens. Anand Padmanabhan, Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Some of the other recent initiatives include the $1 million donation for AI research Fordham received from an alumnus last October, which will be disbursed in the next few years.
The university also has an ongoing Faculty AI Interest Group composed of staff from the Office of IT and professors to explore AI’s applications in education and inform teachers about them.
Next semester, Fordham will begin offering an Advanced Certificate in Ethics and Emerging Technologies dedicated to helping students navigate emerging technical and ethical challenges in the digital age, with a special focus on AI.
Padmanabhan listed three primary reasons for the creation of the AVP role.
One, the university wants to be “prepared with technology that is fast-changing and already impacting everyday life,” “empower students with AI literacy and skills as they enter the workforce after graduation and leverage AI’s ability to improve workflows while keeping ‘humans in the loop,’” Padmanabhan said.
Neti has a lengthy background with AI and has held leadership roles in the healthcare, education and finance industries.
The second advantage Padmanabhan said he projects to see is better organizational coordination thanks to the addition of one centralized role responsible for helping students, staff and faculty take advantage of AI advancements in ways that serve their unique needs.
Third, Padmanabhan reiterated the importance of centralizing the university’s initiatives and strategies regarding AI through the new AVP.
“Regarding AI governance, the university must ensure AI is integrated thoughtfully and ethically through a centralized lens. It’s also critical to create a single focused point of coordination such that we prevent dozens of initiatives from launching in different directions,” Padmanabhan said.
The announcement email stated that, to select an AVP that would “architect our University’s AI transformation to advance its academic mission and operational excellence,” a search committee conducted interviews before bringing two finalists to campus for further review by university leadership.
Neti said he first heard about the position while working with the Healthcare Innovation Center at the Gabelli School of Business on a project relating to cancer research. He was “immediately compelled” and decided to apply due to his admiration for Fordham’s ethos and confidence that his experience could be used “to create meaningful solutions within higher ed.”
Neti also previously helped develop Watson Tutor (a personalized AI tutoring system) while working as the vice president and director of Healthcare Transformation and, later, Education Transformation at IBM (a global tech giant with its own AI system, IBM Watson).
Neti has a lengthy background with AI and has held leadership roles in the healthcare, education and finance industries. He began studying deep learning while obtaining his PhD in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and has since been featured in over 75 publications and received over 25 patents.
Before transitioning to his current role as AVP, Neti was the head of the AI Center of Excellence at the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a cooperative of over 11,500 financial institutions that provides a messaging network for international payments. There, he led the development of a new machine learning platform for fraud detection in partnership with Google and Microsoft.
Neti also previously helped develop Watson Tutor (a personalized AI tutoring system) while working as the vice president and director of Healthcare Transformation and, later, Education Transformation at IBM (a global tech giant with its own AI system, IBM Watson).
With a long career at the forefront of new and emerging technologies, Neti hopes to bring this expertise to Fordham to develop AI strategies that will most benefit students, faculty and staff.
