Hongfang Liu, Ph.D.
Chief Translational AI and Informatics Officer, Dell Medical School
Chair, Department of Quantitative and Systems Health Sciences
About
Hongfang Liu, Ph.D., is the inaugural chief translational AI and informatics officer for The University of Texas at Austin’s emerging academic health system, and will serve beginning in the 2026–27 academic year as the inaugural chair of the Department of Quantitative and Systems Health Sciences at Dell Medical School. She holds the Carolyn and Kenneth Shine Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence.
An internationally recognized leader in biomedical informatics and translational AI with around 500 publications, she brings more than two decades of experience in advancing healthcare AI, clinical informatics, and health data science for biomedical discovery, precision medicine, and learning health systems.
Before joining UT Austin, Dr. Liu served as director of the Center for Translational AI Excellence and Application in Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston’s McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics and as vice president of Learning Health Systems. Prior to UTHealth Houston, she held multiple leadership roles at Mayo Clinic, including founding the Digital Health Sciences Division, directing the Biomedical Informatics Program within the Mayo Clinic Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and leading cancer data science and informatics at Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Dr. Liu’s research has been supported by extensive federal and state funding, including multiple NIH grants, National Science Foundation support and a $6 million CPRIT Established Investigator Recruitment Award. Her recent awards include $27 million NIA-funded research network on real-world data for Alzheimer’s research and $4 million NIH Multimodal Ethical AI Program on digital twins for health. She is a fellow of both the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics and the American College of Medical Informatics, and her honors include the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics, Mayo Clinic Team Science Award, UTHealth Houston Leadership Award, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.