UT Austin Appoints Hongfang Liu to Lead New AI and Health Sciences Department

Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin appointed Hongfang Liu, PhD, as the inaugural chair of its newly created Department of Quantitative and Systems Health Sciences and as chief translational AI and informatics officer for UT Dell Medical Center, according to the university’s announcement. The department officially launches on Aug. 31.

Liu will also hold the Carolyn and Kenneth Shine Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence. She joins UT Austin from leadership roles at UTHealth Houston and Mayo Clinic, where her work focused on biomedical informatics, digital health infrastructure, clinical natural language processing (NLP), and real-world healthcare data systems.

The appointment comes as healthcare organizations continue expanding enterprise AI programs tied to clinical workflows, operational systems, and research infrastructure. Large health systems have increasingly focused on AI-enabled data platforms, including initiatives involving clinical documentation, imaging, predictive analytics, and real-world evidence generation. Related healthcare AI deployments have also accelerated across hospital systems and enterprise care networks.

Mayo Clinic and UT System AI Work

At Mayo Clinic, Liu led development of the Clinical Language Analytics Service Infrastructure, an AI-driven clinical NLP platform that supported more than 800 research projects and over 50 National Institutes of Health-funded studies, according to the university announcement and Mayo Clinic research publications.