{"id":268201,"date":"2026-06-09T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/09\/saif-khairat-named-unc-vice-provost-and-chief-ai-officer\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T07:40:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T11:40:34","slug":"saif-khairat-named-unc-vice-provost-and-chief-ai-officer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/09\/saif-khairat-named-unc-vice-provost-and-chief-ai-officer\/","title":{"rendered":"Saif Khairat named UNC vice provost and chief AI officer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/news\/local\/education\/article316044762.html\">Saif Khairat named UNC vice provost and chief AI officer<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/news\/local\/education\/article316044762.html\">https:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/news\/local\/education\/article316044762.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-06-09 05:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.newsobserver.com\">www.newsobserver.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>        Higher Stakes is a weekly newsletter about higher education from The News &#038; Observer and reporter Jane Winik Sartwell.<\/p>\n<p>            <span class=\"credit\">File images; graphic by Rachel Handley<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Hello reader! I\u2019m glad you\u2019re here. I\u2019m Jane Winik Sartwell, higher education reporter for the News &#038; Observer, and this is Higher Stakes, my weekly newsletter. Let\u2019s get into it.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"h2\">New AI chief + initiatives at UNC-Chapel Hill<\/h2>\n<p>UNC-Chapel Hill has a new chief artificial intelligence officer and vice provost for AI: Saif Khairat, a professor in the nursing school. Khairat will continue to work as a professor as he steps into this new role on campus, which was vacated by Jeff Bardzell in March after just five months on the job.<\/p>\n<p>Khairat is an expert in digital health and AI, according to UNC. He researches health informatics and serves on digital health task forces across the globe. He advises the World Health Organization on its AI policies.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy focus will be on advancing and integrating AI at Carolina in ways that are responsible, practical, collaborative and true to our mission to serve North Carolina and the public good,\u201d Khairat said in a statement. \u201cI am grateful to Provost [Magnus] Egerstedt for this opportunity, and I am energized by what Carolina will accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, UNC is taking on new AI initiatives. Last week, the school launched a two-year study aimed at understanding how North Carolinians are interacting with AI and if local libraries can support AI literacy. Researchers hope to identify local needs and perspectives as well as local institutional capacities and strengths.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe study is designed&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/news\/local\/education\/article316044762.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saif Khairat named UNC vice provost and chief AI officer https:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/news\/local\/education\/article316044762.html Publish Date: 2026-06-09 05:00:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":268202,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/public\/latest-news\/y4t6s1\/picture294020484\/alternates\/LANDSCAPE_1200\/Dean%E2%80%99s%20List%20lead%20image","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268203,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268201\/revisions\/268203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}