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Dr. Lance Eaton believes education should be accessible to everyone, though figuring out how keeps him busy. Since 2011, Lance has worked as an instructional designer and faculty developer throughout New England, teaching across disciplines that shouldn't fit on one business card: history, English, technology, education, and social sciences. This eclectic background means he's constantly learning alongside colleagues and discovering he doesn't know as much as he thought. His PhD from UMass Boston explored why scholars turn to academic pirate networks for research literature, revealing much about what's broken in academic publishing.His current work wrestles with digital tools' possibilities and challenges in education. He's drawn to questions without easy answers: How do we ensure technology expands access rather than creating barriers? How do we navigate AI without losing what makes learning human? Lance believes the best insights come from collaboration because none of us have all the answers.

Rachel Toncelli explores how educators navigate AI while keeping human connection at teaching's heart. A longtime teacher of multilingual students and teacher educator, she now collaborates on faculty development at CATLR. Rachel earned her masters in Anthropology at the Università degli studi di Firenze, her M.Ed. in TESOL at Rhode Island College, and her doctorate in Curriculum, Teaching, Learning, and Leadership at Northeastern University. Her dissertation examined how storytelling in teacher education expands asset-based perspectives of cultural and linguistic diversity.For her, good teaching centers meaningful relationships and collaboration. Her journey from teaching multilingual students to AI-related research reflects an ongoing commitment to wrestling with complex questions alongside fellow educators. Rachel approaches AI's challenges with curiosity and humility, knowing that we're all learning how to teach authentically with these new tools together. Off campus, she creates community the Italian way—around a table full of homemade food and good conversation.

Gail has a Ph.D. in Folklore and decades of experience teaching across the disciplines of oral history, education, and anthropology. She likes connecting with people to learn about their communities, work, and passions. Most people are hungry for someone to care about their interests, to be asked questions and listened to deeply. She enjoys experiences that 1) engage students in the co-creation of work that has value beyond the class, worth sharing with a wider audience; and 2) involve students in telling the story of what they gained and how their work illustrates those gains. She’s excited to imagine what this learning approach might look like in an age of AI. Gail is known nationally for her work in digital storytelling and ePortfolios. In 2014 she received Northeastern’s CPS Teaching Excellence Award. Long walks create an opportunity to see more of the world, and for this reason she’s an avid hiker.

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Michael Sweet has always been fascinated with the generative tensions between the individual and the group, and how each can make the other flourish. His PhD in Educational Psychology and his MA in Group Communication both focused on fruitful ways that the lines between “me” and “we” can be drawn. He has been a national leader in the development of Team-Based Learning and has supported the growth of teachers in higher education since 1995. He sees the advent of generative AI as driving higher education into an era of intense intra- and inter-personal upskilling: creating more values-driven and self-directed learners whose educational experiences are not only personally meaningful for them but also have concrete impact on others in the world. His cats think this is a grand idea.