The Institute was well-represented in NC State’s Office of Academic Strategy, Innovation and Solutions (OASIS)’s Accelerator program during the 2025-2026 academic year. With OASIS Accelerator support, IAA faculty, staff and students executed one-year pilot projects intended to drive progress towards NC State’s institutional academic goals.
A team of IAA faculty and staff — Kate Bagley, Susan Chen, Dr. Bill Rand, Dr. Andrea Villanes and April Wilson — led an OASIS Accelerator-sponsored project wherein they surveyed MSA alumni to determine if our curriculum aligns with the rapidly evolving needs of industry. The findings, based on feedback from 160 survey respondents, indicate that our foundational competencies remain strong while demands for skills like SQL, cloud computing and AI usage as a productivity tool are growing. Dr. Villanes presented the survey findings at the IAA Alumni Summit in April. View her slides here.
The IAA’s Dr. Sarah Egan Warren served as a co-principal investigator on an interdisciplinary team of NC State faculty on another OASIS Accelerator-sponsored project. Her team developed a scalable, evidence-based framework for AI literacy at NC State through participatory action research across multiple disciplines, demonstrating that effective AI readiness depends on ethical, context-specific human-AI collaboration embedded within disciplinary learning. The project’s outcomes include a forthcoming manuscript submission to the Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development.
Finally, Carlos Alonzo-Montufar ’26, who holds an undergraduate degree in textile engineering from NC State, was involved with an OASIS Accelerator-sponsored project team of Wilson College of Textiles representatives. Their project, Textiles2Go, is a platform that offers self-paced, short-format microcredentials on specialized topics for learners inside and outside the textile industry, based on precisely the skills employers are hiring for.
Each project team presented its work at a showcase in late April — see here for more about the showcase.