Artificial Intelligence Community

Using AI to Build Tools for Students, Faculty, and Internal Teams

Last week, Julie Flores Demers, CRA, CRA (University of Bridgeport) shared a great example of how she used ChatGPT to create a draft IRB checklist for students and faculty engaged in human subjects research. After reviewing the AI-generated draft, she personalized it to reflect her university's specific policies and workflows-and the final result is a clear, comprehensive guide that simplifies a complex process.

💡 It's a great reminder of how AI can help us start with structure-especially when we're building resources for multiple audiences like faculty, students, or internal staff. 📝 I've uploaded Julie's IRB Checklist here as a reference-thank you again, Julie!

This week's question for the community:
Have you used AI to create internal tools or resources-like checklists, guides, templates, or walkthroughs-for your campus?

• What was the use case?

• How did you prompt the tool?

• What worked-and what needed human fine-tuning?

If you haven't yet, is there a resource you've been meaning to build that AI could help jumpstart?

Let's swap examples-and if you're open to it, feel free to attach a screenshot or snippet of what you created.

We are all looking forward to hearing how you're putting these tools to work!

Wishing you an AI-powered, low stress week!

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Lisa Wilson
Interim Assistant Vice President, Office of Research Administration
Emory University
Atlanta, GA
4705721794
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I am a department level approver for preproposals.  Our college has a very diverse portfolio of agencies.    I created a Gemini prompt to create guideline summaries to extract the primary questions to obtain from all guidelines.  It works well on longer guidelines but doesn't understand TFFA IDC. 

My next project is creating a prompt to help draft the budget justifications for faculty connecting it with the information provided on internal excel budgets.  Has anyone made any progress in this area that they would be willing to share?  

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Tammy Siegel
Research Administrator III
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
(863) 332-9140
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Thank you so much, Lisa Wilson, for spearheading our new weekly use‑case discussions-and a big thanks to Tammy, Julie, Brian, Kari, Tubal, Fran, Robin, Baron, and everyone who's already shared their examples and insights. Your real‑world contributions are exactly what will make this community thrive, and I'm genuinely excited to keep learning from you and brainstorming together!

On that note, I recently explored the AI Hub in Microsoft Power Automate to build no‑code flows that read PDFs and automatically populate data to SharePoint lists-everything from key invoice details to subaward contact information. With both pre‑built and custom models available, it's fairly easy to use. Give it a try if you haven't yet, and let us know how it goes!

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Youyou Cheng
Deputy Director, SPFA
Yale University
25 Science Park
New Haven, CT 06511
203-785-4370
youyou.cheng@...
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Original Message:
Sent: Tue July 29, 2025 08:28
From: Tammy Siegel
Subject: 📌 Prompt of the Week – Monday, July 28, 2025

I am a department level approver for preproposals.  Our college has a very diverse portfolio of agencies.    I created a Gemini prompt to create guideline summaries to extract the primary questions to obtain from all guidelines.  It works well on longer guidelines but doesn't understand TFFA IDC. 

My next project is creating a prompt to help draft the budget justifications for faculty connecting it with the information provided on internal excel budgets.  Has anyone made any progress in this area that they would be willing to share?  

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Tammy Siegel
Research Administrator III
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
(863) 332-9140
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"It works well on longer guidelines but doesn't understand TFFA IDC." 

That's oddly hilarious. I remember when the TFFA guidelines came out and the chaos that ensued. Now even AI doesn't understand how it works.

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Eric Dinwiddie
Pre-Award Grants Specialist
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA
(540) 231-2751
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Original Message:
Sent: Tue July 29, 2025 08:28
From: Tammy Siegel
Subject: 📌 Prompt of the Week – Monday, July 28, 2025

I am a department level approver for preproposals.  Our college has a very diverse portfolio of agencies.    I created a Gemini prompt to create guideline summaries to extract the primary questions to obtain from all guidelines.  It works well on longer guidelines but doesn't understand TFFA IDC. 

My next project is creating a prompt to help draft the budget justifications for faculty connecting it with the information provided on internal excel budgets.  Has anyone made any progress in this area that they would be willing to share?  

------------------------------
Tammy Siegel
Research Administrator III
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
(863) 332-9140
------------------------------

I used AI (our institution's version of Chat GPT) to help create an onboarding program for new Research Administrators.  I provided the content I wanted to include and asked it to help fill in any gaps, and then it helped me format it for consistency.  I asked it things like, "Are there any other terms a brand new research administrator should know? Provide simple definitions and explain any acronyms." It did a pretty good job but it definitely needed a human to review the output because sometimes it would include irrelevant or incorrect information when I asked it to provide more - it's like it wanted to help but didn't have more to add so it started to make up things instead! Overall, I'm very happy with the product and using AI saved me a ton of time.

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Julie Olivero
Research Administrator, d3c
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

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Thanks so much Julie for sharing! What a great example of how AI can save time while still need our expert review to ensure accuracy! AI is a great tool for onboarding and training - with a solid repository of SOPs, you can further train an AI to serve as an onboarding/training bot!

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Youyou Cheng
Deputy Director, SPFA
Yale University
25 Science Park
New Haven, CT 06511
203-785-4370
youyou.cheng@...
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Tue September 16, 2025 08:09
From: Julie Olivero
Subject: 📌 Prompt of the Week – Monday, July 28, 2025

I used AI (our institution's version of Chat GPT) to help create an onboarding program for new Research Administrators.  I provided the content I wanted to include and asked it to help fill in any gaps, and then it helped me format it for consistency.  I asked it things like, "Are there any other terms a brand new research administrator should know? Provide simple definitions and explain any acronyms." It did a pretty good job but it definitely needed a human to review the output because sometimes it would include irrelevant or incorrect information when I asked it to provide more - it's like it wanted to help but didn't have more to add so it started to make up things instead! Overall, I'm very happy with the product and using AI saved me a ton of time.

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Julie Olivero
Research Administrator, d3c
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

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