The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has selected Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine to establish the Center for Humanities-based Health AI Innovation (CHHAIN), a pioneering initiative that will embed humanities research into the development of trustworthy health AI technologies. This three-year initiative, jointly led by Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute and the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor, will be located in the MHRI’s new space in Helix Park.
CHHAIN, supported by a $500,000 NEH grant, will serve as a central hub for exploring how humanities-based insights, particularly those grounded in ethics, history and patient narratives, can shape the future of responsible AI in health care. Vasiliki Rahimzadeh, assistant professor at Baylor in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and Kirsten Ostherr, director of the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice, will be co-directors of the new center. Together, they will lead an interdisciplinary team of medical humanities and bioethics scholars from both institutions, with additional partners across the greater Houston area.
“For AI to truly improve health outcomes, it must be designed with patient trust and wellbeing at its core,” Rahimzadeh said. “CHHAIN will provide a dedicated space to explore critical bioethics questions, such as how we ensure AI respects patient autonomy, addresses the needs of underserved 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.”
The initiative will also engage in strategic collaborations with Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and its fellow in science and technology policy Kirstin Matthews and Dr. Quianta Moore, executive director of The Hackett Center for Mental Health at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, to translate research into public engagement and policy impact.
CHHAIN’s work will unfold across three core activities:
- Defining trustworthy AI through patient voices
- Translating humanities insights into clinical AI settings
- Public engagement and policy translation
This initiative builds on a strong foundation of collaboration between Baylor and Rice, including pilot funding from the Margaret M. and Albert B. Alkek Department of Medicine at Baylor and a grant from Rice’s Provost’s TMC Collaborator Fund. These early investments critically shaped CHHAIN’s research mission, demonstrating the power of cross-institutional support for catalyzing transformative research at the intersection of medicine, technology and ethics.
“CHHAIN represents a bold new model for placing the humanities at the center of health innovation,” Ostherr said. “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.”
CHHAIN’s long-term vision is to establish a national model for integrating the humanities into the design and implementation of health AI. By advancing cutting-edge humanities research, translating insights into clinical and policy settings and engaging the public through education and outreach, CHHAIN aims to ensure that future health technologies are not only innovative but also ethical, inclusive and responsive to the real needs of patients. This initiative lays the foundation for a sustained, cross-sector effort to build AI systems that earn public trust and improve health outcomes for all communities.