Redbird Scholar Q&A: 5 questions with Provost Ani Yazedjian

Dr. Ani Yazedjian brought a lengthy research resume when she entered the Provost’s Office six years ago. It has only expanded since then. For instance, in the months following her promotion from associate provost to acting provost in 2023, she published four co-authored research articles on topics related to community partnerships with schools, relationship education, and teens’ social media behavior.

How did she find the time? “Well, I don’t get a lot of sleep, so that’s one, but my continued productivity as a scholar, even as an administrator at ISU, was because I was part of a great team of people,” Yazedjian said.

Appears In




Redbird Scholar: Spring 2025

The studies emerged from the Champaign Area Relationship Education for Youth (CARE4U) project, which Yazedjian started a decade ago while she was a University Professor and researcher of adolescent development in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences. The $5 million federally funded initiative provided relationship, job readiness, and financial literacy programming for at-risk youth. She credited her collaborators—Dr. Luke Russell, associate professor of human development and family science, and Dr. Dan Lannin, associate professor of psychology—and the students who assisted their research for making the publications possible.

“In our discipline, collaboration across departments, but also across universities, is common, but it really was the only way that I was able to remain research active,” she said.

Yazedjian plans to continue to foster cross-disciplinary research across the University in her newest role. Last spring she was named vice president for Academic Affairs and provost. “My priority is simple: It’s supporting ISU faculty to do the scholarly and creative activity that they want to do.”

In the following Q&A, Yazedjian discusses Illinois State’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities as a research institution.

What are our strengths as a university in terms of research, and where would you like to see us improve or expand?

We have a lot of scholars doing exceptional work in traditional and applied research and creative activity, and I think we have pockets of excellence across the university. But there are other universities that are known for a particular area, and I don’t know that ISU is necessarily there. So we’re working on amplifying and identifying some of those areas of excellence.

We started the ARCS (Advancing Research and Creative Scholarship) program to support interdisciplinary scholarship, because I think a lot of the problems of the future are interdisciplinary in nature. The ARCS program provides initial funding to bring those teams together to collect pilot data that then makes them competitive for future external funding.

I think an area where we can continue to strengthen our infrastructure is in supporting scholarly activity, particularly when it comes to external funding. Like many R2 universities, we don’t have the resources that R1 universities have. So how can we channel the resources that we do have in ways that are most meaningful for the scholars that we have? There are systems we created that make it more challenging for our own scholars.

How can we improve on those, so that we can support the people who are already doing good work, so that they can continue to do the work, and so that more people will also participate? The ARCS program has been an important initiative. You’ve also helped launch the Connected Communities Initiative between ISU and OSF HealthCare. With that in mind, are there other research initiatives you are looking to expand or start?

We’re starting this new interdisciplinary degree program in data science and will be enrolling our first cohort of students in fall 2025. In the way that the curriculum is built, there are opportunities for synergy across the College of Business, College of Arts and Sciences, and College of Applied Science and Technology. As we hire scholars to teach those classes or as our current faculty develop their expertise in those areas, that will be a prime area for developing our scholarship related to data science.

I think the other area is generative AI, which is another area that is prime for interdisciplinary scholarship. I think about that differently than some others might think about it. We don’t have the infrastructure here to support pure generative AI or the development of generative AI tools. I think our niche is related to how people apply those tools in socially responsible ways. And we already have people on campus who are doing some of that.

And then how do you teach students about those tools? So then you can do the scholarship of teaching and learning about generative AI, or you can do research about how people integrate those tools into their operations, etc. I think that’s a place, particularly in the College of Education, where we have some opportunities.

Last spring the University formed the Committee on the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence. Do you see that committee having an ongoing role in how the University engages with AI technology?

There are many questions about how such a major disruption impacts how people approach their scholarly and creative activity. This committee is going to be the group that looks at these changes, thinks about how that influences our operations, and thinks about how that influences our approach to research. The specifics will change over time, but I see this group as filling that gap of knowing what’s out there and translating the implications for people on campus. One example specific to research is that (Associate Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies) Craig McLauchlan and his folks released a guidance document last spring about how this impacts research and scholarly activity.

Generative AI continues to permeate everything that we do. For example, we have a lot of people on campus who have a ChatGPT account. We don’t know what they’re doing with that account, and we don’t know how much training they’ve had. This is an open-source software, so from the research perspective, are people putting personally identifiable, confidential data into ChatGPT? The role of this committee will continue to evolve, but they need to be at the forefront of these conversations, and they need to be providing those guardrails and that advice.

What impact do you expect the new College of Engineering to have on the University’s research capacity?

It’s certainly going to expand our research capacity because we’re going to have new faculty doing research in new areas. There will also be future opportunities for people in our existing colleges to partner on the work that’s being done in engineering. I think it’s going to be a great way to expand the interdisciplinary work that we’re doing on campus.

Why is research important at a school whose bread and butter is undergraduate education?

First, it’s important for faculty to remain active in their fields. It’s one thing to read about the scholarship that’s being done by others. It’s a very different thing doing the actual work. You have a different understanding about the advances in your field, the hot topics in your field, and so I do believe that our faculty must continue to hone their skills, to hone their expertise, to engage in research, because then they can take that information back into the classroom.

And unlike universities that are maybe even more teaching-oriented than ISU, we actually integrate time into the faculty role for people to maintain a scholarly or creative activity agenda. It gives them fulfillment. I loved teaching, but I also really enjoyed the research that I was doing. So a school like ISU, actually allows people like me to be able to have the best of both worlds, because we are able to continue things we are passionate about, while also teaching and engaging with students.

On the student side, it’s particularly meaningful as well, because they have faculty who are engaged in research, who are sharing it in the classroom, number one, but also because that provides opportunities for undergraduate students to engage in research, which we know is a high-impact practice that supports achievement, retention, and progress to graduation. They may not necessarily get that at an R1 university, where there is a much greater focus on securing external grants, publishing, etc. Those opportunities are typically limited to postdoctoral associates, research associates, doctoral students, advanced master’s students. But at a school like ISU, undergraduate students are right in there, conceptualizing the problems, working on developing the theory, collecting the data, analyzing the data. Students at a primarily undergraduate institution have an opportunity to present at conferences and to be co-authors on articles, which they may never have had at a more research-intensive university.

One thing that I want to work on as provost is related to who gets those opportunities, because there is an equity issue there. A lot of times, the students who participate in research are the ones who may know about the value of participating in research, so they pursue those opportunities or have the time to pursue those opportunities.

And if you are the first person in your family attending college, it may not even be on your radar to pursue those opportunities. Similarly, if you are a student who is from an under-resourced family, and that’s more and more of our students, you have to make a choice between the time you spend working to make money versus time that you might spend doing research, which may or may not be unpaid. That’s where some of the programs that Associate Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies Craig McLauchlan runs for undergraduate students are super-important because they allow students to get some money to be able to participate in research projects. We need to look systemically that we are giving all students the information they need, and that we’re not allowing resources to stand in the way of students having those very impactful and meaningful experiences.

The final thing that I’ll say about the impact research has on students is even if a student is never going to go to graduate school, participating in a research experience provides them with transferable skills for any job that they’re going to do. They have experience conceptualizing a problem, collecting data, making sense of information. They can take those skills and experiences into the workplace.