UNO's Chun-Hua Tsai Earns Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Chun-Hua Tsai, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Nebraska Omaha's (UNO) College of Information Science & Technology (IS&T), has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, one of the agency's most prestigious honors for early-career researchers.

The CAREER Award, funded by the NSF's Division of Information & Intelligent Systems, recognizes early-career faculty who show the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in their field. Tsai's project, "Nutrition Chatbots: Advancing Nutritional Health and Dietary Counseling Through Human-AI Collaboration," will receive a total intended award of $679,084 over a five-year continuing grant running from October 2026 through September 2031.

"I am deeply honored to receive the NSF CAREER Award," said Tsai, who credited NSF, his University of Nebraska Medical Center collaborators, UNO mentors and his students for helping shape the work. He said the recognition supports not just his research, but his long-term commitment to mentoring students and building interdisciplinary work at the intersection of human-computer interaction, AI, and public health.

Poor diet is a leading contributor to diabetes, heart disease and other chronic illnesses that affect millions of Americans, yet many people struggle to understand nutrition information, and health professionals often lack the tools to deliver personalized guidance.

The CAREER-funded project will study three connected areas: scenario-based nutrition learning, personalized conversational coaching using multimodal data such as meal images and activity patterns, and participatory design with health decision-makers to ensure the tools are practical, ethical, and clinically meaningful. Students will be involved in designing, building, and evaluating AI-supported nutrition tools, gaining hands-on experience in human-centered AI, health informatics, and responsible information system design.

"The broader goal of this CAREER project is to develop human-centered AI systems that can make nutrition information more understandable, personalized and useful in everyday life," Tsai said. The award will fund student research and training, integrate the research into coursework, and support outreach to rural and underserved communities through open-source tools, datasets and evaluation frameworks for the responsible use of AI in preventive health.

The project builds on Tsai's decade-long research agenda in human-computer interaction, explainable AI and health informatics. In March 2026, he was named one of 25 inaugural National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) AI Education Fellows by the Computing Research Association (CRA).

As communities continue to engage with and learn about the practical and ethical uses of artificial intelligence, Tsai's research is advancing the College of IS&T's mission of developing human-centered AI systems, preparing the workforce for future jobs, and expanding community engagement.

Robin Gandhi, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Research at the College of IS&T, said the award strengthens the college's research, particularly in its Human Centered Computing Collaboratorium: "The NSF CAREER Award marks the start of a journey that gives Dr. Tsai the runway to nurture curiosity, bring students directly into the discovery process, and lay the groundwork for contributions that can serve our community and the field for decades to come."

More Information:

• Learn more about the NSF Award