Siobahn Day Grady Wants Everyone to Be AI Literate

Siobahn Day Grady doesn't buy the idea that AI belongs only to computer science departments. At North Carolina Central University, where she's an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences, she's spent the last two years building something that treats AI literacy like a basic campus utility rather than a specialized major. In January 2025, that effort became the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research, or IAIER — the first AI research institute housed at a historically Black college or university.

The timing matters because the money rarely flows this way. A 2025 report from the Center for American Progress and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund found that HBCUs make up roughly 3 percent of four-year institutions in the U.S. but pull in less than 1 percent of federal research and development funding. Seventeen of the 43 federal agencies that handed out research money to universities in 2023 gave HBCUs nothing. NCCU doesn't even have a dedicated computer science program yet — it's building one now, alongside a new AI minor — which makes IAIER's rise in under two years feel less like a slow academic rollout and more like, in Grady's own words, running a startup.

A $1 million grant from Google.org got things moving, and the institute has since touched more than 2,800 students, faculty, and community members. Every incoming freshman now takes an introductory AI course built with IBM, focused on foundational prompting skills. Faculty across disciplines — social work, digital archiving, health care — have received seed grants up to $10,000 to build AI into their research; the first round funded 11 projects, including a simulation lab where social work students practice client interactions. Grady's pitch is that industry, not higher ed, is where AI is actually moving fast, so IAIER has leaned hard into partnerships with Deloitte, FICO, Anthropic, Google, and IBM, and last year hosted the first OpenAI Academy Summit ever held at an HBCU, pulling in 444 participants from more than 40 institutions.

None of this erases the funding math. Grady calls sustainability the institute's biggest barrier, and demand is already outpacing what IAIER can deliver. The political backdrop is messy, too — federal research budgets are under pressure and diversity-focused programs face new scrutiny under the Trump administration, even as that same administration announced a $500 million one-time investment for HBCUs and tribally chartered institutions this past September. NCCU has kept picking up support anyway: a nearly $500,000 National Science Foundation award last September, shared with Howard University and two other schools, is funding work to map emerging AI jobs and skills. This fall, IAIER gets its first dedicated physical space on campus.

Grady's dissertation work, back when she was finishing her Ph.D. in 2018, looked at whether someone's writing style on social media could give away their identity — a reminder that she's been thinking about data, patterns, and what people give away for free long before AI hype hit university boardrooms. Now she wants IAIER's structure to be something other schools, HBCU or not, can copy outright.