Stony Brook University has stood up an academic department devoted to a question most universities are still answering with committees: what artificial intelligence is doing to the people who use it. The Department of Technology, AI and Society, housed in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, launched with a $5 million grant from SUNY spread over three years, and its first classes are already running this fall.

The university's provost, Carl Lejuez, has described it as one of the first departments of its kind in the country. Rather than teaching students how to build AI systems, which Stony Brook's computer science and engineering programs already do, the new department studies how those systems reshape the economy, culture and daily life, and trains students to work on that boundary.

The chair spent her career on the human side of technology

Donghee Yvette Wohn became the department's inaugural chair on September 1. She came from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where she directed the PhD program in informatics and ran the Social Interaction Lab, and her research sits squarely in the territory the new department covers: content moderation, online harassment, digital identity and how user-generated AI content behaves on social platforms.

Her path to the role ran through newsrooms as well as labs. Before academia she covered science and technology for the International Herald Tribune, and she has held appointments at Northwestern, Michigan State, Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and research stints with LG Electronics and the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea. The department is now hiring additional faculty in responsible and social AI.

The whole campus is working the same problem

The new department is the institutional piece of a broader push that was on display at homecoming this month. On October 16, President Andrea Goldsmith moderated a panel called The AI Revolution at Stony Brook at the Charles B. Wang Center, part of the university's first Homecoming Thought Leadership Series, and Wohn headlined the engineering college's own session on AI and society.

The panel gave a sense of how far AI already reaches into the university's work. Stony Brook Medicine's breast imaging program has used AI since 2018 to flag suspicious mammogram findings, and its chief of breast imaging, Dr. Cindy Lee, is researching whether those tools perform equally well across racial and ethnic groups, work tied to the mobile mammography program that serves communities with less access to screening. A cardiologist on the panel, Dr. On Chen, showed an interactive 3D heart model built with AI by an undergraduate that lets users simulate a blocked artery and watch the effect on an electrocardiogram.

Panelists were equally direct about the risks: answers that sound confident and are wrong, students who lean on tools instead of learning to think, and research that gets easier to produce and harder to evaluate. That tension, between what the technology can do and what it does to people, is the new department's entire syllabus.

What it means here

For Long Island students, the practical effect is a new academic home at the flagship public research university on the Island for studying AI without becoming an engineer, and for the region it adds faculty hiring and research funding aimed at a field growing faster than its guardrails. AI classes under the new department are running now, with the department building out its course offerings as hiring continues.

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