The V-ARE Lab designs and studies AI-driven virtual characters and conversational agents that communicate health information to the people who need it most.

Our research runs from formative design work through deployed intervention: understanding what patients, caregivers, clinicians, and community health workers actually need; building web-based virtual humans and large language model systems around those needs; and evaluating whether they change knowledge, trust, and behavior.

Current projects address racial bias in clinical training, dementia education for Latino caregivers and community health workers, brain donation, early childhood oral health, clinical trial recruitment, digital twins of doctors, multi-agent medical reasoning, and AI mentorship for student retention.

The lab is directed by Dr. Mohan Zalake in the Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences, College of Applied Health Sciences, University of Illinois Chicago.