U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Hillery Anderson came to the Watson School for International and Public Affairs as a visiting scholar and national defense fellow through the Military Fellows Program after a stint as an intelligence officer at the Pentagon. She is using her time at Watson to, among other things, investigate how artificial intelligence will be used in children’s education in the United States, and how it is likely to impact students’ learning and development.
Anderson, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Panama, grew up in Riverside County in Southern California, not far from March Air Force Base. The youngest of three children, she said her high-achieving older siblings were her “guideposts” growing up. “They were both straight-A students who went to elite universities — Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard Law,” she said. “I felt like I had very high standards to meet.”
Anderson also excelled in school and, with a strong interest in public policy, chose to attend one of the nation’s top-ranked public affairs schools, The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 2006.
While in school, Anderson said she did not initially plan on joining the military. But a roommate in the school’s Army ROTC program convinced her of the benefits of a military career, and she joined the university’s Air Force ROTC program. While in the program, she was chosen for the Air Force’s intelligence career path, which she said was a “very exciting” development.
After graduating from Syracuse, she was sent to Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas for intelligence training, then received her first assignment in her home state of California at Beale Air Force Base. While serving, she earned a master’s degree in public policy from New England College, a master’s in military operational art and science from the United States Air Force Air Command Staff College, and a master’s in military strategy from the Air Force’s elite School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.
Anderson was also deployed numerous times in support of operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa, and served as a staff officer at Indo-Pacific Command. Her most recent assignment before coming to Watson was at the U.S. Air Force Headquarters at the Pentagon.
Given her impressive educational background, her commanding officer at the Pentagon encouraged Anderson to apply for a military fellowship. “It’s a pretty selective process,” she said, “only 6% of lieutenant colonels who apply are accepted for in-residence senior service developmental education, and only 10% of those selected get the opportunity to attend a fellowship.”
Anderson said that Brown’s reputation for rigorous scholarship that crosses traditional academic boundaries made the school especially appealing to her. “I knew Brown’s curriculum was more open-ended than other Ivies,” she said, “and I wanted to explore ideas across a variety of fields.”
At first blush, Anderson’s current area of study might not seem pertinent to the Air Force. “I’m looking at how artificial intelligence is going to be incorporated into the way we teach our children,” she said. When asked why AI and education would be of concern to the Air Force, she replied, “When you bring a new recruit into the Air Force, they are a product of the educational background that they come in with. In the future, there is going to be a lot more use of AI in the American educational system as well as a lot more AI education.”
“There are two things about this that are interesting to me,” said Anderson. “First, artificial intelligence is going to impact how children learn, and the Air Force needs to understand how that will affect our incoming recruits. Second, students will be better versed in how to use AI, and the Air Force needs to know what level of AI proficiency it wants recruits to have.”
Anderson said the federal government is already getting involved in AI education on the K-12 level. She cited President Donald Trump’s April 23, 2025, executive order, “Advancing Artificial Intelligence for American Youth.”
The order states that, “It is the policy of the United States to promote AI literacy and proficiency among Americans by promoting the appropriate integration of AI into education, providing comprehensive AI training for educators, and fostering early exposure to AI concepts and technology to develop an AI-ready workforce and the next generation of American AI innovators.”
“We’re competing with China when it comes to AI,” said Anderson. “I equate it to the space race in the late fifties and sixties, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, which started the race to the moon. Because of that, President Kennedy launched an initiative to incorporate more math and science into U.S. secondary education.”
While there are parallels, Anderson noted that AI competition with China is very different as well. “Artificial intelligence is a more nebulous technology. We don't always know how it works. It’s kind of a black hole,” she said. “So it’s important to understand what the key developmental benchmarking skills are that we want children to have as we augment their education with artificial intelligence,” she said.
