About the Program
The Freedman Fellows Program supports and funds current members of CWRU holding appointments as faculty, researcher, or instructor from all departments with planning and developing digital research projects and instruction. Freedman Fellows partner with the Digital Scholarship team and/or other library experts to advance their projects throughout the year. These liaisons advise recipients on project design, technological needs, and adjacent issues such as copyright, privacy, and data ethics. The funding model is flexible, providing a pool of funds that can be used to support projects of varying size.
Meet the Fellows
The 2025-2026 cohort of Freedman Fellows was chosen in Spring 2025.
Alexis Block leads a project that explores the central role of touch in human relationships. She is creating a curated, labeled dataset of short video clips that depict diverse social touch interactions—from supportive hugs to celebratory high-fives—across a range of social, emotional, and cultural contexts. The dataset will serve as a foundational resource for developing emotionally intelligent robotic systems capable of social-physical human-robot interaction.
Gourav Datta and team are exploring how to make large language models (LLMs) a practical choice on university or public-facing computing resources by developing a novel method for compressing the Key-Value cache using Tucker decomposition. This method can increase memory efficiency and be integrated into a wide range of transformer architectures already in use, potentially allowing for greater application of LLMs in research infrastructure.
Kelly McMann and team are employing artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a high-quality environmental policies dataset. The dataset will comprehensively document environmental policies that national governments have adopted (or not) in all countries of the world to address environmental problems such as non-renewable energy, transport fuel/oil consumption, CO2 emissions, deforestation, and ecosystem degradation.
Learn more about the Fellows and their projects at this link.
How to Apply
Applications for the 2025-2026 Faculty Freedman Fellowship closed on March 31st. More information is also available at our Frequently Asked Questions page.
To schedule a consultation, please contact FreedmanFellows@case.edu.
The Freedman Fellows program has been generously funded by the Freedman Fellows Endowment, established by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman, and managed by the Kelvin Smith Library.