WashU announced a new cluster hiring campaign seeking to employ over 30 new tenure-track faculty members by 2029 and expand artificial-intelligence-centric research within the University-wide +AI launch from earlier this year.

This hiring effort is an extension to the Rules of Life initiative within the chemistry, physics, and biology departments that began in October 2025 with the addition of four assistant professors who specialized in AI. The Office of the Provost and the deans of the participating schools, including the School of Law, Brown School, Bursky School of Public Health, College of Arts & Sciences, Olin Business School, and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, are heading the faculty onboarding with the intent to “shape the future of AI across science, society and creative practice,” according to the announcement on WashUs Artificial Intelligence webpage.

The University seeks to employ hirees in four distinct thematic focuses. First, there is Agentic AI: Governance, Society, and Institutions; then Human Values, Creative Practice, and AI; AI-Driven Imaging Science: Imaging from Molecules to the Universe; and finally, AI for Science and Engineering: Modeling the Physical World.

Jennifer Heemstra, chair of the chemistry department and a co-founder of +AI, said this round of employment will continue collaborative and interdepartmental teaching and research methods with the addition of topics in statistics, data science, philosophy, and psychological and brain sciences to the existing programming. 

“We hired new faculty. We brought together existing faculty. They are engaging with each other, collaborating, advancing their research together. What we are doing right now is that within the campus-wide +AI hiring initiative, we have the opportunity to run a search that is focused specifically on Rules of Life,” Heemstra said.

The program will also use this new faculty to further integrate AI into undergraduate academic life. Assistant Professor of Chemistry Zhiling Zheng, one of the first individuals hired in the Rules of Life initiative, explained some practical applications of the program across both undergraduate- and graduate-level studies.

“I think [the current undergraduate class’s] generation is actually at this kind of edge of the rise of AI, so I actually find it’s good timing to actually incorporate [AI] into the existing curriculum,” Zheng said. “Students can, whether or not they like it or hate it, get a chance to at least know what exactly this is and how it can impact the daily study even for scientific research.”

+AI program leaders seek to encourage more AI integration into coursework, emphasizing technological literacy, intellectual integrity, and ethics-based thinking. This includes offering courses like Zheng’s class CHEM 5080 – Artificial Intelligence for Experimental Chemistry, starting the fall 2026 semester. The addition of more AI cluster hires could possibly increase the number of available AI-centric courses in WashU’s catalog as well as incorporate AI coursework into existing curricula.

“When we hire new faculty, their teaching can reflect the cutting edge of what they’re doing in their research, and so hiring faculty who are using AI in their research is going to lead to not only potentially new classes that are helping students gain these skills … but also is likely to bring those research skills into other courses,” Heemstra said. 

The integration of +AI is not isolated to STEM within the College of Arts & Sciences but will also be incorporated into the humanities. Because of this, Heemstra expressed excitement for the philosophy department’s specific role in this initiative in terms of ethics and humanities-focused considerations. 

“This is one of the reasons why I’ll say that I’m very excited that philosophy is part of this Rules of Life +AI cluster,” Heemstra said. “We will be bringing together the researchers who are using AI … with experts who will be doing research exactly on that topic of how we think of AI from a perspective of ethics and humanity, so that’s a huge strength of this initiative.”

In addition to the cluster hires, the +AI program initiated a series of workshops over the summer to incentivize faculty to implement more academic uses for AI, discuss the University’s existing policies on the topic, and develop new formatting for AI involvement in existing courses. 

Zheng said there was a mixed response from staff, but some were still open to the program. 

“I do know some professors who don’t believe in AI, but they still incorporate it into the class,” he said. “What everyone is doing is trying to make sure this is an option for students, so they can learn this kind of cutting-edge [technology].”

As AI is becoming increasingly present in higher education, Heemstra said the initiative must be undertaken with care from all angles. 

“We all need to approach any new technology with a mixture of enthusiasm and caution and be thinking through the implications,” Heemstra said.