AI Faculty Fellow

What Is the AI Faculty Fellow’s Role?

Artificial intelligence is reshaping education, work and society. 

California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian has made building AI literacy a Vision 2030 priority, with the goal of adopting and using AI and Generative AI (GenAI) while focused on the HUMANS-centered principles — a foundational framework aimed at ensuring that AI adoption across California’s 116 community colleges is human-centered, ethical and equitable. Students, faculty and staff must have the fundamentals of GenAI literacy, including effective prompt construction and considered verification of AI output. 

In support of this, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office has launched the AI Fellows Program and recently announced a partnership with Google. These statewide initiatives provide access to Google's Gemini AI app, which is compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protecting the privacy of student education records, as well as career certificates and AI training courses and support tools. The new AI Faculty Coordinator will ensure that De Anza’s faculty and students fully benefit from these statewide resources while leading campuswide AI literacy efforts.

Closer to home, De Anza needs AI experts. Faculty have made clear their need for leadership and innovation on AI at De Anza. Now is the time to invest in innovation and campuswide discussions about AI and its role in education. Developing these requires dedicated time and focused efforts that this position will supply while working with a broad range of faculty.

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About De Anza's Current AI Faculty Fellow 

Chesa Caparas became the De Anza AI Faculty Fellow in January 2026. 

Chesa is deeply interested in technology’s impact on society and has been researching and teaching about digital culture since 2007. In 2022, before ChatGPT became publicly available, she completed a sabbatical project on AI literacy. She is currently pursuing a second master's in Information and Knowledge Strategy at Columbia University. Her coursework and research focus on integrating AI into large organizations.  

Previously, she has been a Stanford Human Rights Education Fellow focusing on human rights violations in the tech industry, Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines studying media and information literacy in politically polarized communities and California Learning Lab AI Faculty Innovator in Residence leading an intersegmental statewide AI learning community. Her scholarly work has been published in the Journal of Information Ethics, Journal of California English, ASCCC’s Rostrum, League for Innovations’ Innovation Showcase and MLA’s Exploring AI Pedagogy.