Leading the advancement of health care through AI

In every health care university, there are leaders whose journeys, passions, and commitments shape the experiences of students and the future.

The Beyond the CV series looks past the bios of the deans leading UTHealth Houston’s schools to explore their personal motivations, defining moments, and guiding philosophies.

This month, Jiajie Zhang, PhD, dean and The Glassell Family Foundation Distinguished Chair in Informatics Excellence at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston, shares insights on the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence in health care, the importance of lifelong learning, and how the cognitive revolution is transforming education, medicine, and the future of work.

Why did you pursue a career in biomedical informatics?

From the very beginning, I’ve had a curiosity to understand the human mind, which is human intelligence. To do that, we need to study how the mind works. If we can get there, we can go a little further to create artificial intelligence that can help everyone. I chose medicine and health care because medicine is probably one of the most knowledge-rich disciplines where human intelligence and AI can really make a big impact.

You’ve accomplished so much in your career. How do you keep evolving professionally and stay motivated?

Curiosity is the baseline, but a more important factor is a real fear of being obsolete, especially in our field of informatics, which today is mostly about AI. AI is advancing at an incredible speed. Two to three years is like one generation instead of 20 years for human life or centuries for the Industrial Revolution. We are in the middle of something extremely fast. If I don’t nurture my knowledge for three weeks, I feel behind. If I don’t learn for three months, I become a prehistoric figure. That’s a powerful motivator.

Tell us about a proud moment in your career where you greatly impacted a student and why it means so much to you.

Last year, at the induction ceremony for the elected fellows of the American College of Medical Informatics, which is the high society for our field, four of the approximately 24 fellows across the country were personally related to me. Three of them were my former students, and the fourth was a student of one of my former students. When you see this, you realize that the impact and leadership are actually compounding, and that’s much more important than any title I have, any grant I receive, or any publications I generate. This is truly the most important part I’m proud of.

Is there a standout moment during your tenure as dean that makes you most proud?

The naming of the school. When the president and Mr. McWilliams decided to give us a truly transformational gift, it was more than just philanthropy or support for what we do. First, it was a visionary gift from his perspective and ours, because he saw the future of health care using artificial intelligence. Second, it was a recognition of what we do here at UTHealth Houston as our school works with every other school to transform health care and health.

The legacy, basically in the name, will stay with us forever. I believe where we are today is something fundamental, evoking the scale of human civilization. If you look at past human history, there have been three fundamental economic transformations: the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, which transformed society by providing stable food; the industrial revolution, driven by steam engine, which liberated people from physical labor and took a couple of hundred years. Today, what everyone is experiencing, whether they realize it or not, is the liberation of humanity from cognitive labor. Calculation is now offloaded to AI, allowing humans to focus on more important things for jobs, education, work, and society.

What do you think makes UTHealth Houston and McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics unique compared to other schools?

UTHealth Houston is located in the largest medical complex in the world, with immense activities and resources. For the school, I believe we are still the only freestanding school of its kind in the nation, and of course, we are the biggest because everything is big in Texas. As an independent school, we have the capacity and freedom to do things at the speed of AI. When we need new courses for our students, we can implement them over one semester. In contrast, at a different institution, bureaucracy might take a year or two, by which time the content would be out of date. We are truly free to create new things; we basically have a cycle of about two to five years where we change a lot. That’s how we grow our school and how we’ve tripled almost everything over the past 10-15 years, managing change and leading in health care and health.

We have a lot of talent here, and institutions come to my school to recruit my faculty. One of my jobs is to keep them happy and here. But if they go out to do major jobs elsewhere, I’m happy for them and offer my congratulations, because they’ve done well and moved into leadership positions at other institutions. This is not a loss for our school; it’s recognition of what we have done.

What qualities do you want graduates to leave with as they pursue the next steps in their career?

Number one, they must be lifelong learners. School is just one phase of their learning experience. They simply have to keep learning, especially in the age of AI. If you don’t, you will fall behind. As I mentioned, the speed of AI is very fast. Even for me, if I don’t learn new things in a few weeks, I feel behind.

Number two, which is also important, they need to be system thinkers. They shouldn’t just focus on a specific thing but make connections, because the whole world is interconnected. With technology, you can make those connections much more efficiently.

What excites you most about the future of biomedical informatics and biomedical informatics education, and how is your school preparing for that future?

Let’s jump back to the three economic transformations because that’s a very important point for people to grasp. We are at the beginning of the third transformation, which I call the cognitive revolution. AI and technology are liberating people from cognitive work, and the speed is very fast. We are prepared for that through education, research, and innovations, products that we can use in practice. For students, again, it’s about being a lifelong learner. We have to learn even after finishing school and learn new things constantly. If we don’t, we will be affected.

I have both fear and excitement about the future of AI. The excitement is that AI has already changed everything. If people aren’t realizing this, I tell them that the biggest risk of AI is not AI itself, but that you are not aware of it, not using it every day, and not learning it every day. It’s changing everything for many industries and societies, but unfortunately, many people aren’t aware for different reasons. One is lack of information, which we can help with. The second part is fear that AI will cause job displacement. That's probably true, because new jobs will be created, some jobs will be lost, and most importantly, every job will be transformed. Our job as educators is to ensure people are prepared, educated, and upskilled to work better with AI. AI will never replace humans, and it will never replace doctors, but doctors who use AI will replace doctors who do not.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people don’t know.

I never attended high school; I skipped that entire stage of schooling. Perhaps I was a beta tester of accelerated learning. This experience motivated me to be a lifelong learner from the very beginning, because I knew I missed a lot of curriculum, so I had to learn on my own. That habit has stayed with me. I learn things in my profession and also new things that I do after work.

Another thing people don’t know about me is that I write poems in my spare time, and I compose music. The music is generated in collaboration with AI. I wanted to be a musician when I was a child. I still don't know why I ended up doing informatics. Over the holiday last month, I picked up a poem I wrote about two years ago and wanted to create music for it, imagining a full rock and roll band. If I had to do this myself, it would take ten years of professional training to achieve the same performance; with AI, it took me several hours.

It’s actually on YouTube. The poem is written in classic Chinese and set to rock and roll music. I created the video with AI, and it’s on YouTube with a band singing in Chinese, with subtitles. My plan is to create an entire album by the end of the year with English poems. I've even played it in my class for students, and their reaction is always “Wow, unbelievable!” Even for me, when I hear it, I think, “Wow, it's so good!” It’s amazing what AI can do.

Music is more about emotional intelligence, and my actual work is more about cognitive intelligence. But these two are always together; they reinforce each other. Especially with poems, you need a lot of metaphors and imagination, which are fundamental for scientific research and thinking.

That’s a big lesson we should learn: AI is doing many things we couldn’t even imagine in the past, including making us more creative. AI is not going to replace humans. What people don’t realize is that you bring things to AI so AI can do it for you. The most important part is for people to bring wisdom to AI so AI can amplify their wisdom.