Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University have received a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to launch the Center for Humanities-based Health AI Innovation (CHHAIN). The new center aims to integrate humanities research into the development of artificial intelligence technologies in healthcare.
The three-year initiative will be based at Baylor’s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, working in partnership with Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute. Dr. Vasiliki Rahimzadeh, assistant professor at Baylor, and Dr. Kirsten Ostherr, director at Rice, will serve as co-directors. Their interdisciplinary team will include scholars from both institutions and partners across Houston.
“For AI to truly improve health outcomes, it must be designed with patient trust and wellbeing at its core,” said Rahimzadeh. “CHHAIN will provide a dedicated space to explore critical bioethics questions, such as how we ensure AI respects patient autonomy, addresses the needs of undeserved communities and integrates meaningfully into clinical care. Our goal is to translate these insights into real-world health settings where AI is already shaping patient experiences."
CHHAIN plans to collaborate with Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and its science and technology policy fellow Kirstin Matthews, as well as the Hackett Center for Mental Health at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute led by Dr. Quianta Moore. These partnerships are intended to help translate research findings into public engagement efforts and policy recommendations.
The project builds on earlier collaborations between Baylor and Rice, including pilot funding from Baylor’s Margaret M. and Albert B. Alkek Department of Medicine and a grant from Rice's Provost's TMC Collaborator Fund. This prior support helped shape CHHAIN’s research focus on combining medicine, technology, and ethics.
“CHHAIN represents a bold new model for integrating the humanities into health innovation,” said Ostherr. “It will create a collaborative space where humanities scholars, patients, developers and clinicians can come together to explore the human dimensions of health AI—trust, narrative, and lived experience. These are essential perspectives that are too often missing from technology development, and CHHAIN is designed to change that."
The long-term objective of CHHAIN is to become a national example for including humanities in designing health-related AI systems. The center intends to conduct advanced humanities research, apply its findings in clinical practice and policy settings, and engage with the public through education initiatives.
More information about NEH’s 97 funded projects can be found at https://www.neh.gov/news/neh-announces-41-million-funding-97-humanities-projects-nationwide.
