AI Workshops for DSPH
AI Workshops for DSPH
Dornsife School of Public Health | Drexel University
A hands-on workshop series for faculty, staff, and graduate students
Welcome
This is a hands-on series introducing AI tools for everyone at the Dornsife School of Public Health—faculty, administrative and research staff, and graduate students. Each session runs one hour: a brief overview followed by activities you can complete in the session.
For 2026–27 the series is organized into four core sessions plus a set of electives and a monthly AI Clinic. The four core sessions are the shared foundation: they run weekly in the fall term and repeat in spring, so you can catch them whenever they fit your year. Electives run once a year, by demand. The Clinic is a 45-minute drop-in for whatever you’re actually stuck on.
No prior experience with AI is required. The focus is practical: what these tools can do, how to use them to save time on real work, and how to bring them into team projects and coursework.
Prefer to learn at your own pace? The Self-Paced Tracks turn these topics into self-guided pages with practice activities, readiness quizzes, and curated readings—43 topics across seven tracks, from data analysis to governance and ethics.
The throughline across every workshop and track is the same: AI is a productivity tool, not a substitute for your expertise. Use it to get past the blank page, draft, summarize, and pressure-test your thinking—then bring your own judgment, taste, and accountability to the result. The goal is to develop the judgment for where AI needs close scrutiny (high-stakes, irreversible, or hard-to-verify work) and where it doesn’t—and to watch for cognitive offloading, handing over so much thinking that your own skills and voice quietly erode. More in Keeping Your Judgment: Cognitive Offloading & When to Scrutinize AI.
- Format: Four one-hour hands-on core sessions, plus electives and a monthly clinic, all on Zoom; join from a computer, not a phone
- Audience: DSPH faculty, staff (administrative and research), and graduate students
- Cadence: The four core sessions run weekly in the fall term and repeat in spring. Electives are offered once a year, by demand. The AI Clinic meets monthly in the same slot.
- Dates and location: Announced by school email and posted on this page
- Registration: Required for core sessions and electives; the Clinic is drop-in, no registration
- Recording: Core sessions are recorded and posted here afterward
- Facilitator: D. Alex Quistberg, PhD, MPH (daq26@drexel.edu)
Core Sessions
Four one-hour sessions that everyone is welcome at, run every fall and repeated every spring. They build on each other, but each stands alone—come to all four, or drop into the ones most relevant to your work.
| # | Session | What You’ll Do |
|---|---|---|
| Core 1 | Foundations & Capabilities | What generative AI is, which Drexel-approved tools to use, and prompting that gets useful results |
| Core 2 | Workflow Enhancement | Make AI part of your weekly routine: summarize, rewrite, and make tables with ChatGPT Edu and Copilot Chat, and save the prompts that work |
| Core 3 | Reusable Assistants | Turn prompts that work into shared Projects, custom GPTs, and simple agentic assistants your team or lab can reuse |
| Core 4 | Verify, Disclose, Decide | A hands-on hour on verification, funder and journal policy, disclosure, and the judgment calls in between |
Slides and materials for each session are linked at the top of its page.
Electives
Offered once a year, by demand. Dates are announced by school email.
| Elective | What You’ll Do |
|---|---|
| Documents & Visuals with Adobe | Acrobat AI Assistant for PDFs and Firefly for infographics and communication graphics |
| AI for Curriculum Development | Design courses and build teaching materials with ChatGPT Edu, Copilot Chat, and Gemini Notebook, plus optional Canvas-ready pages with Claude Code or Codex |
| How I Use AI: Building This Course | A live demo of one real project, this website, as an example of AI in teaching, admin, and research work (date to be announced) |
| Data & Code for Research Staff (planned) | AI for data cleaning, coding in Stata/R/Python, debugging, and reproducible analysis |
| AI for Grad Students (planned) | Coursework, thesis and dissertation work, and the disclosure norms you’ll be held to |
Until the two planned electives are scheduled, their material is already available self-paced: the Data & Analysis and Technical & Agentic tracks cover the research-staff topics, and the Learning Paths page has a graduate-student path.
Monthly AI Clinic
New this year. A 45-minute drop-in in the same slot each month. No registration, no agenda, no slides—bring real work: a prompt that isn’t behaving, a document you want to speed up, a disclosure question, a workflow you’d like to build. We work on it together. Come with a question or come to listen.
Ethics and governance aren’t a bolt-on module—they run through the whole series. Cores 1–3 each open with a short beat tied to that day’s work: how AI fails and who’s accountable (Core 1), verifying and disclosing in daily workflows (Core 2), and data, consent, and oversight when assistants are shared (Core 3). Core 4 is where those beats come together into a full hands-on hour—verification you actually practice, what funders and journals now require, how to disclose, and how to decide what needs scrutiny. The electives apply the same thread to their own terrain (representation and bias in AI media; integrity, accessibility, and FERPA in teaching). Throughout, we work from Drexel policy and the ASPPH and WHO frameworks.
Quick Links
Who This Is For
The four core sessions are one shared foundation for the whole school. The activities are chosen to be useful whether you manage grants and schedules, coordinate research, teach and run a lab, or are working through an MPH, MS, or doctoral program.
- Administrative staff — drafting, reformatting, summarizing, and the recurring documents that eat your week.
- Research staff and coordinators — recaps, protocols, reports, and the data work that surrounds an analysis. For coding and analysis specifically, the Data & Analysis and Technical & Agentic tracks go deep, and a research-staff elective is planned.
- Faculty — writing, literature, methods, teaching materials, and the disclosure expectations attached to each.
- Graduate students — ChatGPT Edu became available to Drexel students in August 2026, and the norms around coursework, theses, and publication are shifting fast. The core sessions cover the tools and the rules; the Learning Paths page has a graduate-student sequence for coursework and for thesis/dissertation work. Your course AI policies still come from your instructors—these sessions help you read and follow them, not replace them.
Schedule
The four core sessions run through the fall term and repeat in winter quarter (winter dates to be announced). Electives are offered once a year. Sessions are held on Zoom — links come with the Outlook invitations sent to the school.
Fall 2026
| Date | Time | Session |
|---|---|---|
| Tue, Sept 29 | 1:00–2:00 PM | AI in the Classroom (faculty session) |
| Tue, Oct 13 | 1:00–2:00 PM | Core 1 · Foundations & Capabilities |
| Thu, Oct 22 | 2:00–3:00 PM | AI in the Classroom (faculty session) |
| Tue, Oct 27 | 1:00–2:00 PM | Core 2 · Workflow Enhancement |
| Tue, Nov 10 | 1:00–2:00 PM | Core 3 · Reusable Assistants |
| Thu, Nov 19 | 1:00–2:00 PM | AI in the Classroom (faculty session) |
| Tue, Nov 24 | 1:00–2:00 PM | Core 4 · Verify, Disclose, Decide |
| Thu, Dec 3 | 1:00–2:00 PM | Elective · Documents & Visuals (Adobe) |
| Tue, Dec 15 | 1:00–2:00 PM | AI in the Classroom (faculty session) |
The series continues in winter quarter — the core sessions repeat and the AI for Curriculum Development elective runs then; dates announced by school email and posted here.
Before You Come
- Confirm your access to ChatGPT Edu (available to Drexel faculty, professional staff, and students — access details; see Tools & Access)
- Confirm you can sign in to Microsoft Copilot Chat with your Drexel account (everyone)
- Join from a computer, not a phone, so you can keep Zoom and your browser side by side
- Bring a real (non-sensitive) work task you’d like help with—an email to draft, a document to summarize, a report section or assignment to outline
- Read the one-page data privacy rules below
Drexel-approved tools are not all equal on data:
- ChatGPT Edu is licensed by Drexel and governed by Drexel’s ChatGPT Edu Terms of Use. Your prompts are not used to train OpenAI models. Use the current default model in the Drexel workspace unless a session tells you otherwise. Do not enter sensitive information that Drexel must protect by law, contract, or policy, including PHI.
- Microsoft Copilot Chat with Enterprise Data Protection is listed by Drexel as usable with High Risk Data when signed in with a Drexel account, and Low Risk Data otherwise.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot (the paid Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams) is not currently provided by Drexel. Use Copilot Chat and paste or upload your content instead.
- Zoom AI Companion is listed by Drexel as usable with High Risk Data when a meeting is not recorded or transcribed, and Low Risk Data when it is recorded or transcribed. Notify participants when it is active.
- Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant, PDF Spaces, Creative Cloud, and Express are listed by Drexel as usable with Moderate Risk Data.
- Research study data is stricter than the tiers: none of it goes into commercial/consumer AI tools (PII and HIPAA data absolutely never), and even de-identified, aggregate, or public study data needs the PI’s approval and must respect the IRB protocol, any data use agreement, and the data source’s terms of use. See the Research Data callout on Tools & Access.
- Claude, ChatGPT personal, Gemini, Perplexity, and other consumer tools are Low Risk Data only unless separately approved by Drexel. Use these only with public or fully synthetic information.
When in doubt, de-identify, use synthetic data, or ask before entering anything sensitive. Drexel’s AI Tools page lists the approved data classification level for each tool. We cover this in detail in Core 1.
Questions?
Contact D. Alex Quistberg at daq26@drexel.edu.
About this site
This site and its materials were developed by D. Alex Quistberg with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) — used as a drafting and design partner for the workshop content, self-paced tracks, and activities. In keeping with the series’ own guidance, AI helped accelerate the work, and the author reviewed, verified, and is accountable for what’s published here. Built with Quarto.