March 20, 2026
Partnering to Embrace AI on Campus
Pitt is applying Claude for Education in the Health Sciences and Sports Analytics Cloud Innovation Center, powered by AWS, for student-faculty-industry collaboration on AI solutions.
TOPICS: Innovation & Commercialization | Partnerships
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Strategic Communications
The University of Pittsburgh is leading a national milestone by partnering with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create an AI-enabled Campus of the Future. Through this partnership, Pitt becomes the first university to secure an institution-wide agreement for the state-of-the-art AI model Claude for Education integrated with AWS.
Among several initiatives across the University, Pitt is applying Claude for Education in the Health Sciences and Sports Analytics Cloud Innovation Center, powered by AWS, for student-faculty-industry collaboration on AI solutions.
The University of Pittsburgh has been forward-thinking in its approach to AI and leveraging AWS technology across its campus from health sciences to sports.
Kim Majerus, vice president of global education and U.S. state and local government at AWS.
Claude for Education is an advanced AI assistant developed by Anthropic, distinguished by its approach to learning and enterprise applications. It encourages critical thinking by posing guiding questions and offering personalized support, preparing students to use professional AI tools and meet educational and administrative needs.
This agreement builds on Pitt’s established track record in responsible AI, recognized by Anthropic and AWS for its technological and governance groundwork, including the Pitt-AWS Cloud Innovation Center and commitment to ethical AI frameworks.
“The University of Pittsburgh has been forward-thinking in its approach to AI and leveraging AWS technology across its campus from health sciences to sports,” said Kim Majerus, vice president of global education and U.S. state and local government at AWS. “This collaboration demonstrates how cloud infrastructure and advanced AI models can work together seamlessly to create transformative educational experiences. We’re proud to help Pitt lead the way in showing what’s possible when universities embrace AI thoughtfully and strategically.”
Christopher Horvat is already embracing the use of AI to solve a major issue for medical researchers: the incompatibility of proprietary EHR codes among different hospitals.
Horvat is an associate professor of critical care medicine, Pitt School of Medicine, and senior director of clinical informatics, Pitt Department of Critical Care Medicine and UPMC ICU Service Center.
“Take something as simple as a sodium level. If you search the EHR, you’ll find 329 different variables with ‘sodium’ in the name,” he said.
“One might look right, but unless you actually query and validate it, you could be looking at a urine sodium, a sodium supplement, or finally the blood sodium you meant to find,” he explained. “This complexity is the single biggest barrier to meaningful use of EHR data, and a major reason why hospitals still struggle to share data reliably.”
Horvat worked with Cloud Innovation Center intern Gary Farrell, an undergraduate computer science and data science major, and Maciej Zukowski, an Amazon Web Services Solutions architect, to come up with a solution that involves using a large language model, Claude Sonnet 4.5.
“The idea was to build a model that can identify and map data on its own. When you receive a massive EHR export with only minimal context, the model should be able to tell you exactly what each variable represents, without sending someone back into charts to manually verify everything,” said Horvat.