Carolina Discoveries

Carolina Discoveries

Portrait of Penny Gordon-Larsen.

Welcome to Carolina Discoveries, a blog from Vice Chancellor for Research Penny Gordon-Larsen about current topics pertinent to the Carolina research community. Every month Dr. Gordon-Larsen will post a personal message that provides updates from the OVCR organization, insights from the greater UNC research enterprise, or recognition of those that help make us one of the top public research universities in the world.


Roadmap Mile Marker: Carolina’s Strategic Research Areas and AI Capabilities  

October 9, 2025

by Penny Gordon-Larsen

As a leading public research institution, Carolina continues to build on its immense talent and collaborative culture to tackle the world’s most complex challenges. Our strategic Research Roadmap is the critical guide for this success, and in this month’s blog, I will highlight our strategic research priority areas and our emphasis on expanding our AI research portfolio and infrastructure, which we have articulated through the Roadmap process. 

Five Strategic Research Areas

Our success is rooted in a collaborative, pan-campus approach that fosters interdisciplinary research and scholarship. As I have previously shared, through engaging with campus stakeholders, we have identified five areas in which our research enterprise has demonstrated Carolina excellence — a critical mass of talent, unique advantages in infrastructure and resources, and high funding potential that guides future investments. These areas are both current strengths and avenues for strategic growth. 

  1. Applying AI to Benefit & Save Lives: Transforming data assets into actionable knowledge for lifesaving innovations while equipping researchers with new AI resources to work more efficiently, gain deeper insights, and make groundbreaking discoveries. 
  2. Preventing & Curing Diseases: Leveraging our unique strengths in clinical, public health, and basic sciences to make transformative discoveries that protect and improve health. This includes accelerating personalized cancer treatment through the integration of chemical biology and AI and developing innovative chemical and drug discovery platforms. 
  3. Accelerating Environmental & Renewable Solutions: Empowering our expertise in fundamental, natural, and applied sciences to engineer solutions for a healthier planet. Our work includes pioneering research in solar fuels, advancing energy storage, and leveraging AI to enhance grid resilience and sustainability. 
  4. Optimizing Brain Health & Wellbeing: Utilizing Carolina’s extensive strengths in neuroscience and biomedical imaging and informatics to improve health and wellbeing across the life course. This includes advancing solutions for substance use disorders and utilizing innovative imaging technologies and AI for research and intervention. 
  5. Building Healthy & Resilient Communities: Applying the talents of our top-ranked health affairs, social sciences, and arts and humanities to improve the well-being of all people. Examples include accelerating health care breakthroughs through secure AI systems and demonstrating leadership in research that addresses the health needs of rural populations globally. 

The First Strategic Research Area 

Advances in AI are bringing incredible opportunities to almost every aspect of life, and at Carolina, we are working to ensure our researchers lead in the use of AI and digital technologies. Our deep well of expertise is fostering collaboration like never before. Nowhere is this more evident than in the health and clinical domains where we are already seeing breakthroughs. AI stands to expedite discoveries and drive greater efficiency and precision in diagnostics and early detection, treatment optimization, clinical decision support, and more.  

Here are just a few areas where Carolina researchers are making incredible progress: 

Precision Health: Researchers are developing sophisticated AI algorithms and statistical methodologies in precision health, with applications designed to improve care for critical health issues like diabetes, cancer, and osteoarthritis. 

Drug Discovery: The Molecular Modeling Lab at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy leverages AI to accelerate the discovery of novel therapeutics for illnesses like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and viral diseases.  

AI-Powered Biomedical Platforms: Applying AI systems to electronic health records (EHR) is accelerating discovery by identifying patient cohorts, revealing disease patterns, and integrating clinical, genomic, and social data. The OMOP Research Data Repository—Deidentified (ORDR-D) is Carolina’s next-generation health data environment.   

Cancer Diagnostics: The Cancer Identification & Precision Oncology Center is a transformative initiative spanning 12 campus units that is set to revolutionize rapid cancer identification and precision treatments by quickly aggregating and analyzing a wide range of health data, including EHRs, histopathological and radiological images, insurance claims, and geographic information. 

New Approach Methodologies: Across the University, our researchers have been at the forefront of new approach methodologies, or non-animal testing technology, spanning computational modeling, organoid & organ on a chip assays, brain slice technology,  and deep expertise in engineered cell models. The promise of this research offers more humane, human-relevant, and economical alternatives to speed therapeutic discoveries.  

Cardiac Diagnostics: Data science methods are being used to improve diagnostic accuracy in emergency cardiac diagnoses, showing that AI can determine the likelihood of time-sensitive conditions like acute coronary syndrome, resulting in quicker response and care. 

Genetics and Biology: A Creativity Hubs funded team is combining an AI approach with biological sciences to examine how genetic information is regulated at a chemical level, a step that can eventually inform therapies for treatable DNA-based diseases. 

Maternal Health: To expand prenatal care in low-resource areas like Zambia and rural North Carolina, an interdisciplinary team is utilizing low-cost, AI-assisted ultrasound devices. By removing the requirement for trained technicians, this innovation provides lifesaving diagnostics at a fraction of the traditional cost. 

Public Health: Drawing from the exceptional leadership in advanced AI methods within the Department of Biostatistics in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, we are advancing the way we deliver public health by enabling proactive, population-level insights that predict risk, guide prevention, and reducing barriers, addressing susceptibility to diseases and exposures. 

Enabling AI Infrastructure

Moving forward, we will utilize and expand Carolina’s vast, unique, and valuable data assets. These assets are our key differentiators and distinguish us nationally and globally. The holy grail for clinical AI applications is extensive and easy to access high-quality EHR data, much of which is privacy-protected.  

EHRs provide essential breadth and depth of real-world patient information including diagnostics, treatments, and outcomes that are needed to train, validate, and deploy highly accurate AI models. Universities like ours, through their partner health systems, have quality data, but they are often locked behind firewalls. Only a handful of institutions can provide access to high-quality EHR data in a privacy-protected environment, and Carolina is developing a groundbreaking platform that does just that.  

The University and UNC Health, with the support of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and NC TraCS, have partnered to create two specialized campus-wide platforms with enormous potential to drive discovery and impact and move us closer to true personalized clinical trials and clinical care. Importantly, they provide unprecedented opportunities for AI. I am incredibly excited about their potential to benefit and save lives, and I look forward to sharing more about these platforms with our research community soon. I am incredibly excited about their potential to benefit and save lives. 

Carolina’s long history of excellence in data science, computing, and interdisciplinary collaboration provides a powerful foundation for the next era of AI-driven discovery. Across our campus, extraordinary faculty, students, and staff are harnessing advanced resources, from the Longleaf Computing Cluster and RENCI’s high-capacity storage systems to the Research Data Management Core (RDMC)’s data infrastructure, to tackle complex challenges in health, science, and society. Together, these assets and our uniquely collaborative culture position Carolina to lead in translating data and AI innovation into knowledge and impact that serves the public good. 

To position Carolina at the forefront of discovery and innovation in the AI revolution, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research established the RDMC to ensure data stewardship and strategic use. The RDMC ensures that researchers can efficiently, ethically, and effectively access and use our research data. Unlike most institutions, we have developed a truly comprehensive, campus-wide approach to research data that meaningfully integrates the university, medical center, hospital, and clinical communities. We plan to expand this key asset for even broader applications, including generating AI-ready datasets for broad campus use. This rare capacity to build infrastructure across disciplines and domains has positioned us as a national leader in cultivating the systems essential for data-driven discovery.  

On November 6, the Office of Research Development will host a workshop to showcase Microsoft Azure’s AI Developer tools, another AI resource currently available to our researchers made possible through the Provost’s AI Accelerator Program.  Attendees will learn how to get started with bespoke AI resources that accelerate scalable experiments and collaborations, reduce infrastructure overhead with managed services, and gain practical skills to integrate data pipelines and secure access into their groups’ workflows. 

The journey guided by our Research Roadmap is gaining significant momentum. By strategically focusing our immense talent on five high-impact research areas, we are ensuring that Carolina’s work yields tangible, life-changing results. Our commitment to leadership in this new era is further cemented by the foundational investments we’re making in AI-powered infrastructure. We are actively cultivating the systems and culture necessary to lead the nation in translating our research and innovation into real-world knowledge and impact.