Prof. Tim Oates receives Wilson H. Elkins Academic Transformation Professorship
UMBC has been selected to receive a Wilson H. Elkins Academic Transformation Professorship for FY 2027 in support of the work of CSEE professor Tim Oates. University System of Maryland Chancellor Jay A. Perman announced the $10,000 award in a letter to President Valerie Sheares Ashby, noting that the review committee "was impressed with Dr. Oates's proposal." The professorship is granted competitively across all USM institutions; this year's competition, administered by the USM William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, sought projects that use generative AI to improve access, affordability, and student outcomes at a scale beyond a single course or classroom.
Dr. Oates' project, "Persistent Cognitive Support for Student Success: A Generative AI Approach to Academic Transformation," asks whether generative AI can do more for students than answer questions on demand. Most educational uses of AI are reactive (e.g. tutoring, explanation, content generation) but many students struggle not because they cannot understand the material, but because the work of planning, prioritizing, and sustaining effort across several courses is spread across Blackboard, email, cloud drives, code repositories, and local files. The project will design, build, and evaluate a student-facing, local-first AI assistant that combines course deadlines and announcements with a student's own notes, drafts, and code, and with the history of its earlier conversations, so that it can help decompose assignments, build realistic weekly plans, track progress, and re-plan when circumstances change. Privacy and student control are central to the design: participation is voluntary, and sensitive material stays on the student's machine wherever possible.
The work includes a voluntary multi-course pilot at UMBC measuring assignment completion, course performance, student self-efficacy, and perceived workload, with particular attention to students who face challenges with organization, planning, and executive function. Deliverables include a working prototype, evaluation results, and implementation guidance intended to support adoption and
adaptation at other USM institutions. In his letter, Chancellor Perman wrote that "the knowledge and experience gained from this work will have a significant impact at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and beyond."
The award marks a second consecutive year of Elkins recognition for UMBC. In 2025, Eric Stokan, associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship, received a Wilson H. Elkins Academic Transformation Professorship to develop open-source training materials in computational social science and large language models.
The Elkins professorships were established in 1978 to honor Wilson H. Elkins, who served as president of the University of Maryland from 1954 to 1978.
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