Vivian Hui (PhD ’22), an alumna of the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing, has received the 2026 Sheth International Young Alumni Achievement Award from Pitt. Recognized for her technological innovations in health care, she is the first registered nurse to win this award category.
Hui is a researcher and assistant professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) School of Nursing. She has earned international acclaim for using large language models (LLMs) to drive health care interventions, including the development of chatbots to support survivors of cancer and domestic violence.
Hui traces her interest in AI back to Pitt. During her PhD program, she learned about nursing informatics, took classes on AI data analytics, and developed new technical skills in programming and coding while collaborating with researchers across diverse fields.
“Every week, we were exposed to people from information science, computer science and clinical informatics, and we also collaborated with doctors and nurses in hospitals,” Hui recalled. “My experience at Pitt taught me a lot about how to communicate with people from all disciplines.”
While attending the annual symposium hosted by the American Medical Informatics Association, she started to realize “just how much machine learning has been impacted by or applied to health care,” she said.
For her PhD dissertation, she studied help-seeking behavior among domestic violence survivors in online spaces. She collected social media data from women who posted on the internet forum Reddit, then used computational methods to pinpoint the exact information and emotional support they needed.
This remains a significant focus of her research. She is now writing a book with her former advisor, Associate Professor Rose Constantino, about the role of machine learning in addressing domestic violence. In several research projects at PolyU, she is also developing trauma-informed chatbots—interventions that could change the way that health care services and resources are delivered to marginalized communities.
“Domestic violence is very sensitive in Asian countries, so people don't talk and don't seek help in person because there’s a stigma and embarrassment,” Hui said. “Now everyone goes to ChatGPT or DeepSeek because it’s safe and they don’t feel like they are under any judgment.”
When training chatbots, she emphasizes the importance of customized datasets that contain medically accepted knowledge and approaches, including active listening skills and clinical judgment. While useful for certain populations and purposes, chatbots are meant to be an entry point: Once individuals feel comfortable enough, they will be referred to appropriate in-person resources.
“We want to develop a chatbot or an application that can leverage a large language model's ability, as well as a nurse’s or social worker’s expertise,” she said. “When survivors or victims seek help, we want to ensure the applications are following trauma-informed care.”
Since moving back to Hong Kong, where she grew up, in 2022, she has earned even greater recognition as an expert on AI and LLMs in nursing. She has been appointed to several government committees and has deliberated on topics ranging from mental health to non-communicable disease prevention to technology applications. She is working closely with local officials to deploy AI in Hong Kong bureaus and hospitals, and she provides guidance on how to align AI with nurses’ needs.
At PolyU, she has played an integral role in shaping the nursing curriculum, developing new courses on AI data analytics in nursing and AI applications and innovations in health care. She is also the lead coordinator of the nursing school’s new STEM in Nursing Fellowship, a program designed to nurture science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills in nurses.
Her return to Hong Kong came at an opportune time amidst an AI boom.
“Right now, PolyU is the only nursing school in Hong Kong that is doing compulsory AI trainings at the undergraduate level for our nurses, including machine learning, LLMs, prompt engineering, vibe coding and AI agents,” Hui said.
She has also received funding for several AI interventions, including a chatbot to reduce the fear of cancer recurrence among cancer survivors. She is in the process of developing two additional chatbots for nursing clinical education and patient education, including one that would brief patients on what they need to know before and after surgery.
Beyond AI and education, she is most eager to serve communities in need. She is now leading a local initiative to support the mental health needs of individuals affected by an apartment complex fire that claimed the lives of 168 people in Hong Kong last fall.
“We have about 30 people from multidisciplinary teams—psychiatric nurses, occupational therapists and social workers—who visit the survivors at temporary housing sites to support their well-being and track their mental health,” Hui said. “We want to provide as much support as possible because that was a huge disaster and a big trauma to all of us.”
She also advocates for positive change as a member of several professional and scientific societies, including the Academy of Violence and Abuse, Sigma Theta Tau and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. She was a podcast social media ambassador with the American Medical Informatics Association, and she received the organization’s LEAD Early Career Fund Award in 2023.
Though Hui is just starting her career, she is passionate about designing technological solutions that improve the lives of those who often suffer in silence.
“Domestic violence survivors have told me that when they seek help from police or social workers or nurses, they need to repeat their stories four times, and this is a big retraumatization,” Hui said. “But with generative AI, we can summarize what they discussed with a chatbot beforehand. I want to propose technology that offers coordinated care that can facilitate their help-seeking journey more safely and easily.”