Chun-Hua Tsai, Ph.D.

Bio

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis (ISQA) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where I have been a faculty member since 2021. I also hold a courtesy Assistant Professor appointment in the Division of Health System Sciences, Department of Pediatrics, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

My research brings together Human-Computer Interaction, intelligent user interfaces, and human-centered AI to study how people understand, question, and collaborate with intelligent systems. My work follows three connected directions: conversational and explainable AI, generative AI in healthcare, and community-centered HCI and accountable AI. Across these areas, I combine system design, empirical studies, and participatory methods to connect technical capabilities with people's needs, knowledge, and everyday decisions.

My research has been supported by NSF CAREER and CRII awards as Principal Investigator and an NSF DASS award as Co-Investigator. My projects include AI-supported nutrition and health information seeking, interactive explanations in recommender systems, and accountable disaster-management technologies co-designed with Tribal Nations. I have received Best Paper Awards at ACM Learning @ Scale (2022) and the International Conference on Communities and Technologies (2021).

At UNO, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in HCI, business intelligence, databases, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise systems, and mentor students in interdisciplinary AI research. My teaching connects technical learning with real-world applications and the social consequences of computing. I was selected as a 2025–2026 NSF NAIRR AI Education Fellow.

Before joining UNO, I served as an Assistant Research Professor at Penn State University (2019–2021), working with John M. Carroll. I earned my Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019, advised by Peter Brusilovsky.