My personal quest to improve healthcare — Brian E. Chapman, Ph.D.

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the Department of Health Data Science and Biostatistics, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Health Economics, Systems and Policy, both within the O’Donnell School of Public Health. I have previously held faculty positions at the University of Melbourne, the University of Utah, UC San Diego, and the University of Pittsburgh.

My research spans medical image segmentation, natural language processing, and using large language models to bring reliable healthcare knowledge to patients. I am a survivor of multiple childhood cancers, and that experience has shaped everything — the questions I ask, the problems I choose, and the conviction that patients deserve to be the team leaders of their own care.

Pushing Against Ignorance — my 2023. MEDINFO keynote. Watch on YouTube ↗

I am passionate about empowering patients, exposing informatics students to the historical and philosophical conversation behind their field, and the belief that you can never know enough mathematics.

What you will find here

Medical Narratives — Primary source material: my own encounters with medicine from birth through childhood cancer and into adulthood. Offered for students of health informatics as lived data, not abstraction.

Research — Current and past projects in medical imaging, NLP, and consumer question answering.

Teaching — Course materials, informatics experiences, and reflections on pedagogy.

Talks and Lectures — Thirty-plus presentations from 2009 to the present.

About — Professional biography, institutional affiliations, and CV.

Writing also appears on Pushing Against Ignorance (Substack) and a childhood memoir.