Emerging & Future Technologies

At the scientific core, the Center for Functional Materials (CFM) and NanoteQ Center bring together approximately 40 distinguished faculty working across nanomaterials, quantum information systems, and advanced materials, supported by state-of-the-art fabrication and characterization infrastructure. NanoteQ’s Quantum Computing Working Group is developing novel quantum processing technologies that have already attracted substantial commercial investment.

Artificial intelligence represents the initiative’s second major pillar — one Wake Forest is actively and strategically building, with new programs and collaborations launching across every school and campus. AI @ Wake serves as the university-wide hub connecting faculty, staff, and students to resources and guidance, while the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) at the School of Medicine is establishing leadership in AI-driven healthcare spanning diagnostics, health equity, and cancer care. The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) — recognized internationally as a leader in translating scientific discovery into clinical therapies, and the first in the world to engineer laboratory-grown organs successfully implanted in humans — is now deploying AI, 3D bioprinting, and body-on-a-chip technologies across its work on more than 40 replacement tissues and organs. The Center for Remote Health Monitoring develops user-centered digital health technologies that provide an unprecedented picture of a person’s health in everyday life using wearable sensors, AI, and machine learning to monitor conditions ranging from cardiac arrhythmia and sleep disorders to mental health and mobility. The Center for Bioethics, Health, and Society ensures that across all of these frontiers — from AI-driven diagnostics to engineered organs — ethical oversight and humanistic inquiry remain integral to discovery rather than afterthoughts.

The Departments of Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, and Chemistry provide the core technical foundation for AI and data science research, while the AI in Intelligent Remote Sensing in Conservation and Discovery (IRSC) Lab is pioneering the use of AI and geospatial technologies in biodiversity science — in partnership with the Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability and CINCIA. The Business School’s Center for Analytics Impact links AI and data science to industry partnerships and experiential learning, and the new Master of AI Strategy and Innovation in the School of Professional Studies is preparing the next generation of leaders to navigate AI-driven transformation. Finally, the Intellectual Property Clinic at the Law School is building expertise in the legal frameworks governing emerging technologies, and the AI Institute Summer Program is already building a pipeline of students fluent in both the science and ethics of AI.What makes Wake Forest’s Emerging and Future Technologies initiative truly distinctive is the depth of its human-centered framing. The Humanities Institute, the Center for Literacy Education, and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) lead critical inquiry into how AI and emerging technologies reshape communication, creativity, writing, and pedagogy — while the Program for Leadership and Character brings nationally recognized, research-grounded scholarship on ethics and moral formation directly into engineering and technology education. This breadth reflects Wake Forest’s teacher–scholar model and its Pro Humanitate mission at their most distinctive: the conviction that building technological capacity and cultivating ethical wisdom are not separate tasks but one unified endeavor.