Starting May 27, the Digital Transformation Summer Corps will launch eight ambitious projects. These efforts bring together students and faculty to advance research, improve lives, and accelerate digital innovation.
The 2025 roster of projects includes faculty investigators from six WashU schools and the Center for the Environment. Thirteen faculty members will work alongside nineteen selected students to apply emerging data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to tackle real-world challenges. From modeling movement patterns on campus to a chatbot that simplifies access to Missouri vital records, each initiative reflects the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and digital transformation in action.
Students will also receive guidance from six faculty mentors, meeting weekly for code reviews and progress reports. The DI2 Accelerator’s staff, including AI Engineer Adith Jagadish Boloor, will advise the projects throughout the summer.
At the end of the program, teams will collaborate with campus partners to identify funding opportunities and receive expert proposal writing assistance to scale their work further.
Here’s a preview of what the 2025 Summer Corps will be working on. Find more information about the projects, including faculty PIs and the latest updates at di2.washu.edu/corps
St. Louis Data Dashboard
Schools: Arts & Sciences, Brown School
The dashboard is an interactive platform designed to help researchers, policymakers, and the public explore regional issues like housing and climate resilience through clear, accessible visualizations. This summer, students will expand the dashboard’s datasets and build a data pipeline to keep the platform current and impactful.
AI on WashU Infrastructure: Worked Examples
Collaborator: Information Technology
WashU’s Research Infrastructure Services (RIS) are powerful, but often out of reach for those without advanced coding skills. This team will collaborate with IT to explore ways to make running advanced AI programs more accessible to the campus community.
People’s Voice Survey
School: Medicine
The QuEST Network’s global survey captures individuals’ experiences with their healthcare system. The goal for the summer is to build a user-friendly data visualization and mobile app to present at the upcoming Science for Health Systems conference.
The Mobility Project
Schools: Arts & Sciences, McKelvey
This project will use campus GPS and OpenStreetMap data to model and visualize movement patterns, better understanding how people navigate physical spaces while maintaining user privacy.
AI & Mental Health
School: Arts & Sciences
This project explores how AI might help identify mental health indicators in video footage—paving the way for better support and interventions.
AI & Law
Schools: Law, McKelvey
This exploratory team will investigate how new AI technologies are reshaping legal systems, ethical standards, and public understanding of privacy.
Vision-Language Models for Urban Health
Schools and Departments: Public Health, McKelvey, Center for the Environment
This project aims to automate and accelerate the evaluation of urban environments using vision-language models and street-level imagery, a task typically done manually by surveyors in the field.
Missouri Vital Records Chatbot
School: Arts & Sciences
This project will create a chatbot that walks users through the process of registering, correcting, or ordering a vital record and auto-generating forms, making government services more accessible to Missouri residents.
Each of these projects reflects the core goals of the Summer Corps: collaborative, hands-on work that addresses real-world challenges. Over the next ten weeks, student-faculty teams will develop prototypes, test ideas, and explore what digital transformation can make possible at WashU and beyond.
Sign up for the DI2 Accelerator’s mailing list or follow us on LinkedIn for progress updates throughout the summer and stories from the project teams.