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 specialists 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. Most awards are between $3,000 and $5,000.
How to Apply
Applications for the 2026-2027 cohort of Freedman Fellows are now closed. We will reopen applications for the next cohort in Spring 2027. As a reference, the previous cycle asked applicants to:
- Verify your role at the University
- Describe your proposed project and its outcomes - (500 words or less)
- Detail the intended audience/beneficiaries of your research (250 words or less)
- Discuss the role that students will play in the project
- Upload a plan of work and proposed budget
- List the hardware and software that you will require
We also recommend interested parties consult with a Digital Scholarship specialist. Consultations can be scheduled online at this link, with online and in-person availability. More information is also available at our Frequently Asked Questions page.
If you have any questions, please contact FreedmanFellows@case.edu.
Current Fellows
The 2026-2027 cohort of Freedman Fellows was chosen in Spring 2026.
Lynette Hammond Gerido (School of Medicine) leads a project team that is focused on the intersection of AI-powered consumer products and public health. The team will document how families affected by cancer use AI and consumer health technologies and create an open-access course that raises public awareness of the limitations, ethical considerations, and responsible data stewardship practices associated with patient-initiated AI use. The course will be public facing and the content incorporated into CWRU's medical student curriculum.
M. Hassan Najafi (School of Engineering) is developing an open-source AI platform for wearable health monitoring that is transparent, energy-efficient, and privacy-preserving. This platform addresses many concerns with cloud-based AI tools that are opaque, run on proprietary systems, do not prioritize consumer privacy, and use large amount of energy. Najafi's platform follows open science principles throughout: open code, open data, open methods, and openly interrogable AI decisions. It will also serve as a teaching resource, with modules on AI transparency and health data ethics integrated into a graduate course on Next Generation Computing.
Haoming Song (School of Arts and Sciences) is addressing health disparities in sexual minority populations, including the LGBTQ+ community. Song's project develops an open-source, AI-empowered longitudinal dataset of state-level structural stigma toward sexual minority populations in the U.S. from 2006 to 2025 to construct a harmonized dataset to track structuralized social stigma. The project will have a public-facing website with state-by-state maps and data visualization tools.
Learn more about the Fellows and their projects at this link.
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.