Sunday Edition
Ask The PhD Community
March 15, 2026 | Let's Get Ready for the Week
Empowering 1 Million Educators, One AI Tool at a Time
This week AI moved from the classroom to the laboratory and back again. Researchers used ChatGPT to design a cancer vaccine, a startup raised nearly half a billion dollars to put software creation in every student's hands, and the tools below were chosen to help you start the week strong.
Let's get ready.
Dr. Ali Green
Founder, Ask The PhD Community
This Week's Tools for Your Classroom
Reedle: AI Reading Workspace
Status: Free tier available
Reedle is an AI-powered reading workspace built for heavy academic reading. It renders PDFs with full formula support, includes embedded AI chat, and uses spaced repetition to help you and your students retain what you read. It is built for the kind of dense, citation-heavy reading that defines graduate education.
Try This Before Friday
Upload one PDF from your course reading list. Use the AI chat feature to generate three discussion questions. Share those questions with your students as a warm-up for Thursday class.
Vidocu: Transform Lectures Into Tutorials
Status: Free to try
Vidocu takes any recorded video and converts it into a structured written tutorial with step-by-step instructions and formatted documentation. Faculty who record lectures, walkthroughs, or lab demonstrations can now turn those recordings into reusable written guides in minutes rather than hours.
Try This Before Friday
Upload one of your lecture recordings from this semester. Let Vidocu convert it into a step-by-step tutorial. Post the result to your course management system as a student reference guide.
Gatsbi AI: Professional Course Visuals
Status: Free tier available
Gatsbi AI converts ordinary photos into studio-quality lifestyle images by applying AI-generated backgrounds and lighting. Educators can use it to create polished visuals for syllabi, course websites, and promotional materials without a design budget or photography setup.
Try This Before Friday
Take a photo of your whiteboard or classroom. Upload it to Gatsbi and generate a polished version. Use it as the header image for your course page or next newsletter post.
ChatHelp.ai: 24/7 Student Support
Status: Free tier available
ChatHelp.ai lets you build a custom AI chatbot trained on your own documents and syllabus. You embed it anywhere and students can ask questions around the clock. Departments can use it to reduce repetitive email inquiries and give students faster, more consistent answers.
Try This Before Friday
Create a free ChatHelp.ai chatbot using your course syllabus as the training document. Share the link with students on Tuesday. By Thursday you will have real data on what they ask most.
Uramaki: Social Content in Seconds
Status: Free to start
Uramaki generates ready-to-post social media content from a single text input. Faculty who want to share research, teaching insights, or campus AI news without spending an hour crafting posts can now do it in seconds. It adapts tone for academic audiences and formats content for each platform automatically.
Try This Before Friday
Write one sentence about a topic you are teaching this week. Paste it into Uramaki and let it generate a LinkedIn post. Publish it. That is your academic presence for the week done in under three minutes.
What Happened This Week
A tech entrepreneur with no biology background used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to design a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog. The tumor shrank by 75 percent. Researchers say the method could soon apply to human medicine.
Elon Musk announced that xAI needs a full rebuild after multiple co-founders departed in quick succession. More than nine of the company's original eleven co-founders have now left. Musk is restructuring teams and has brought in senior engineers from the AI coding startup Cursor.
Replit raised 400 million dollars in a Series D round at a 9 billion dollar valuation, tripling its value in six months. The AI-powered software creation platform now supports full-stack app building through natural language with Agent 4.
A Final Reflection for Today
A non-biologist used a publicly available AI tool and redesigned medicine for his dog in a weekend. That story is not about a breakthrough in a lab. It is about access. The same tools that helped Paul Conyngham save Rose are available to your students right now. The question this week is not whether AI will change your field. The question is who gets to be the one who uses it first.
Know Where You Stand with AI
Take the 90-Second AI Readiness Assessment and find out exactly where to start.
Sources
There's An AI For That (TAAFT) Newsletter, March 14, 2026
AI Fire Newsletter, March 15, 2026
The Australian & Daily Mail: ChatGPT Cancer Vaccine Story
Bloomberg: xAI Rebuild
Replit Blog: Series D Announcement
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