Rehumanizing Education in an Age of AI

Emily Lynn Osborn is a faculty member in the Department of History and the College at the University of Chicago, and the Master of the New Collegiate Division. Her scholarship focuses on the social, political, and technological histories of Francophone West Africa. She is the Faculty Director of UChicago’s Senegal Study Abroad CIV and is a recipient of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Osborn chaired the Artificial Intelligence and Education Working Group (AIEWG) in 2025, which resulted in a report on AI and its role in our educational mission. She is currently chairing a university Writing Advisory Group (WAG) that is developing principles and recommendations for teaching and learning with text in the AI landscape.

Santiago Schnell is Provost and Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth, with adjunct appointments in Biomedical Data Science and Biochemistry & Cell Biology at the Geisel School of Medicine. He previously served as the William K. Warren Foundation Dean of the College of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He earned his DPhil in Mathematics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church and a Senior Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust.

An internationally recognized mathematical biologist, Schnell is known for his work on enzyme kinetics and the quantitative modeling of the polymerase chain reaction. Alongside his scientific and academic leadership, he writes on higher education, work and vocation, artificial intelligence, and the relationship between technological progress and human formation. His essays on AI and education, the nature of intelligence, and the future of human work have appeared in The Washington Post, El País, Il Sole 24 Ore, the National Catholic Register, AOC (Analyse Opinion Critique), and Nexo.

His recent writing asks how universities should respond to artificial intelligence without reducing education to the transmission of information or the acquisition of skills, and what dimensions of judgment, intellectual formation, creativity, and human encounter must remain irreducibly human. He has also written on academic freedom and the distinctive vocation of the Catholic university.

Schnell is a member of the American Academy of Sciences & Letters, the Latin American Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Catholic Scholars & Artists, Fellow of the Royal Societies of Chemistry, Biology and Medicine, and a recipient of the Arthur T. Winfree Prize.

David Albertson is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Southern California and an award-winning teacher and writer. He is the author of five books and three dozen articles in medieval philosophy, medieval mysticism, and philosophy of religion.

Albertson received his B.A. in Religious Studies from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Religion from the University of Chicago, after which he spent a year at the Universität zu Köln in Germany with a Fulbright Fellowship before arriving at USC. His most recent works are The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure (Oxford University Press, 2025) and Cusanus Today: Thinking with Nicholas of Cusa between Philosophy and Religion (The Catholic University of America Press, 2024). His next book, co-authored with political philosopher Jason Blakely, is Utopia for Our Century: A Manifesto of Hope (Yale University Press, 2026).

Albertson’s first book, Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres (Oxford University Press, 2014), won the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Prize from the Universität Heidelberg. His research has been supported by multiple grants from the NEH and fellowships from the ACLS, The Huntington Library, and the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Most recently he was a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin and was appointed J. E. & Lillian Byrne Tipton Distinguished Visiting Professor of Catholic Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Albertson is past President of the American Cusanus Society and serves on the Wissenschaftliche Beirat der Cusanus-Gesellschaft at the Universität Trier.

His current projects include editing the Cambridge Companion to Nicholas of Cusa and translating monastic letters and treatises from the late medieval Tegernsee controversy with K. Meredith Ziebart and Thomas Izbicki for Peeters Press.

In 2020, Albertson founded the Nova Forum for Catholic Thought, now affiliated with the In Lumine Network, a national consortium of Catholic institutes supported by the John Templeton Foundation. He writes for Commonweal and America Magazine. 

Dr. Melanie Barrett is Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake / Mundelein Seminary, a graduate Catholic diocesan seminary located in Mundelein, Illinois. She holds two doctorates: (1) a Ph.D. in religious ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School; and (2) an S.T.D. (Sacred Theology Doctorate) in moral theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. She also holds an S.T.L. (Licentiate in Sacred Theology) in dogmatic theology. She teaches courses on Catholic social doctrine; the ethics of sex, marriage, and family; virtue theory; and philosophical ethics. She is a member of the Society of Christian Ethics, the Catholic Theological Society of America, and the Academy of Catholic Theology. Currently, she is completing a book on suffering and the moral life in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.