Hongfang Liu has been named the inaugural chair of the new Department of Quantitative and Systems Health Sciences at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and will serve as chief translational artificial intelligence (AI) and informatics officer for UT Dell Medical Center.
Liu, who assumed the roles effective May 18, also will hold the Carolyn and Kenneth Shine Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence. She will help lead the school’s push to build an AI-native academic health system.
The new department is scheduled to officially launch Aug. 31 and will integrate AI, data science, and systems-level approaches to advance discovery, strengthen healthcare innovation, and support interdisciplinary training in computational and translational medicine.
In her additional role as chief translational AI and informatics officer, Liu will provide strategic academic leadership across clinical care, research, education, and operational innovation – helping embed AI throughout UT Dell Medical Center and Dell Medical School.
“Dr. Liu is one of the nation’s foremost leaders in translational AI and biomedical informatics,” said Claudia F. Lucchinetti, dean of Dell Medical School and senior vice president for medical affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
“She has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to build transformative programs at institutional and national scale,” she continued, “From enterprise AI infrastructure and digital health innovation to multi-institutional research collaborations that directly improve patient care.”
‘Her leadership will be instrumental in shaping the future of AI-enabled medicine at UT Austin,” Lucchinetti said.
According to the university, Liu’s recruitment marks a major milestone in UT-Austin’s effort to create a seamless, digitally enabled academic health system. Her work has focused on turning large-scale biomedical data into actionable knowledge to advance precision medicine and improve patient outcomes.
Liu joins UT Austin from senior leadership posts at UTHealth Houston and Mayo Clinic, where she built internationally recognized programs in biomedical informatics, translational AI, digital health, and real-world data science.
At Mayo Clinic, she led development of enterprise-scale data platforms and the Clinical Language Analytics Service Infrastructure, an AI-powered natural language processing platform that supported more than 800 research projects and over 50 National Institutes of Health-funded studies.
She also led the Open Health Natural Language Processing consortium, which created widely used open-source tools for biomedical NLP.
Since joining UTHealth Houston in 2023 under a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Established Investigator Award, Liu has led major UT System initiatives, including the Health Intelligence Platform and the UT REAL-Health AI Pilot Program to promote responsible AI deployment in healthcare.
“Healthcare is entering a transformative era where artificial intelligence, computational medicine and human-centered care must evolve together,” Liu said. “UT Austin and Dell Medical School have a unique opportunity to build a truly integrated academic health ecosystem that combines technological innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, discovery science and clinical excellence to improve health for individuals and populations alike.”
