Hi, I'm Christopher. I build AI agents for healthcare that patients and clinicians can trust.
What are you working on now?
At the Johns Hopkins Center for Digital Health & AI, I build next-generation AI agents for healthcare and bring them responsibly into clinical practice. Before Hopkins, at the University of Florida, I built AI agents for NIH-funded R24 and U01 projects helping patients learn about and join cancer clinical trials.
About
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Digital Health & AI, Johns Hopkins University.
I work on AI agents for health: LLM-driven conversational and multi-agent systems, how people engage with and trust them, and how to deploy them responsibly. Earlier work in virtual reality and embodiment still shapes how I design these interactions. Much of it is collaborative: with partners such as the Mayo Clinic, I've worked on NIH- and NSF-funded projects addressing cancer disparities in underrepresented populations.
I hold a PhD in Human-Centered Computing and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Florida.
Outside of research I travel, spend time on the lakes, and (poorly) play golf. Boba, my cat, supervises most of my coding.
I'm always glad to talk about new collaborations in human-computer interaction, AI agents, LLMs, and AR/VR.
News
Joined the Johns Hopkins Center for Digital Health & AI
Started as a Postdoctoral Fellow, working on next-generation AI models, responsible AI, and AI implementation in healthcare.
Build-A-Being Yourself published at HCI International 2026
Our web-based system for authoring embodied conversational agents in healthcare research, used across NIH-funded studies.
Defended my dissertation
A change in perspective: Exploring interaction paradigms in AI and virtual human systems that engage users and promote mental health.
Selected publications
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International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2026
@inproceedings{you2025build, title = {{Build-A-Being Yourself}: A web-based system for authoring embodied conversational agents in healthcare research}, author = {You, Christopher and Ghosh, Rashi and Maxim, Andrew and Peng, Xuening and Tamboli, Danish and Huang, Zhanhong and Venkatakrishnan, Roshan and Lok, Benjamin}, booktitle = {International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction}, pages = {427--446}, publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland}, address = {Cham}, year = {2026}, month = {6}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-032-29842-3_28}, } -
Frontiers in Digital Health, 7, 2025
@article{you2025alter, title = {Alter egos alter engagement: perspective-taking can improve disclosure quantity and depth to {AI} chatbots in promoting mental wellbeing}, author = {You, Christopher and Ghosh, Rashi and Vilaro, Melissa and Venkatakrishnan, Roshan and Venkatakrishnan, Rohith and Maxim, Andrew and Peng, Xuening and Tamboli, Danish and Lok, Benjamin}, journal = {Frontiers in Digital Health}, volume = {7}, pages = {1655860}, publisher = {Frontiers}, year = {2025}, month = {9}, doi = {10.3389/fdgth.2025.1655860}, } -
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2024
@article{you2024sense, title = {A sense of urgency on the sense of agency: challenges in evaluating agency and embodiment in virtual reality}, author = {You, Christopher and Venkatakrishnan, Roshan and Venkatakrishnan, Rohith and Han, Zhuoming and Lok, Benjamin and Peck, Tabitha}, journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics}, publisher = {IEEE}, year = {2024}, month = {9}, doi = {10.1109/tvcg.2024.3456139}, }
Projects
- Build-A-Being YourselfLets domain experts deploy embodied conversational interventions at scale, with no programming required.
- ALEX: Clinical trial enrollmentA culturally sensitive virtual health assistant that helps older minority adults learn about and join clinical trials.
- Embodied interactions with AI agentsGuided personas that shape how people interact with a virtual human about their mental health.