Monday, February 8, 2027
Student Union Theatre
ANNUAL FREE PUBLIC LECTURE for students, faculty, and community
Faster Than the Evidence: What AI Is Already Doing in Mental Health
Artificial intelligence has entered mental health care faster than the evidence behind it. It is writing clinical notes, screening for risk, triaging patients, and answering people at two in the morning when no one else is awake. Most of it arrived without the kind of testing we would demand of any other intervention.
Dr. Sam Faulkner, a licensed psychologist with a career in crisis care and hands-on experience designing safety protocols for AI tools, cuts through the hype in both directions. This lecture looks at what the research actually supports, where the tools we study and the tools people use have come apart, how these systems fail, and the ethical questions the field has not yet answered.
Students and faculty across disciplines will leave with better questions to ask of the tools already moving into this work, and a clearer sense of why frontline clinical judgment is the missing voice in how they get built.
About the Paris Endowed Lecture Series
The Paris Lecture Series is made possible through a gift from Dr. John Viehe.
Dr. Viehe has taught at Campbell University for many years after a distinguished career in Military Intelligence. He earned his Ed.D. from North Carolina State University.
The lecture series is in honor of his mother, Ethel Paris Viehe, and aunts, Florence Edith Paris and Cora Paris Hagen.
The Paris Sisters
The Paris sisters were exemplars in the field of education, examples for current students to emulate. Each was born in the city of Buffalo, New York and remained in education long enough to retire and earn a pension. When they entered the field, most teachers were prepared solely at two-year normal schools. Some obtained additional higher education. Among New York State’s major cities, Buffalo had the highest proportion of teachers with no formal education beyond normal school.
However, the Paris Sisters did not follow this trend. Each graduated from Buffalo Normal School (now SUNY Buffalo State College) and then earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Buffalo (now the State University of New York at Buffalo). Subsequently, each of the sisters earned a master’s degree from an Ivy League University.
Firstborn Florence also acquired a Principal’s Certificate and became the youngest and first female principal in the Buffalo School System. She served as principal of Buffalo, New York Public School 65 for 47 years.
Cora, the middle sister, later attended Colorado School of Mines and developed a solid understanding of earth science. During World War II, she stepped forward to support the war effort by teaching science courses, including meteorology, to pilots, enabling the opening of an airplane factory which produced over a thousand lend-lease fighter planes.
Ethel had the misfortune of being widowed with four children under the age of 11; she immediately returned to teaching and became Chairman of the Science department at Hamburg, New York High School. She was awarded three National Science Foundation grants to study specialized advanced topics. She imparted the importance of education to her four, each of whom subsequently earned a doctoral degree.
Past Paris Lectures
