Cal State Fullerton associate professor of psychology Yuko Okado has been named a 2023 National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient. The $979,212 grant award will fund Okado’s five-year project “Improving Persistence of Underserved Students in Psychological Science Using an AI-Based, Personalized Career Exploration Platform.”
Okado’s project, which will run from September 2023 to August 2028, utilizes artificial intelligence technology to assist psychology students who have a desire to pursue STEM-related careers. She is the seventh CSUF faculty member, and the first from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, to receive the NSF CAREER award.
This project will build upon Okado’s previous project: CareerFair.ai. As the COVID-19 pandemic began to take hold, Okado saw an unmet need for mentoring and career guidance, so she sought out a way to make career information more accessible to CSUF students.
She collaborated with Benjamin Nye, the director of Learning Sciences at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and used his virtual mentor technology to create CareerFair.ai, a platform that allows CSUF students to engage with virtual-agent mentors that provide guidance on STEM career paths.
“I thought, why don’t we create a project based on that to see if we could create a career fair-style portal for students free of charge,” Okado said. “It would be something they can access 24/7 so they don’t have to worry about making appointments or having the resources to travel to a mentor.”
The virtual agent-mentors are similar to chatbots, but they are real-life mentors with CSUF-specific, prerecorded video content that provides a more humanized, conversational experience. CareerFair.ai was a broader STEM outreach program open to all CSUF students, but Okado’s CAREER Award project will create virtual-agent mentors that are exclusively psychology-based professionals within STEM fields.
“My students want mentors that have earned…
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