Melissa McCarron Awarded AI Seed Funds for Spanish-Language Healthcare Communication Project
.Melissa McCarron was awarded the UB Office of Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation (CATT) AI seed funds to recruit graduate and professional students from Romance Languages and Literatures, Linguistics, Computer Science and Engineering, Jacobs School of Medicine, and Pharmacy to work on a Spanish-language LLM to facilitate communication between medical professionals and Spanish speakers.
Melissa McCarron Awarded AI Seed Funds for Spanish-Language Healthcare Communication Project
Melissa McCarron, a faculty member in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) at the University at Buffalo, has been awarded AI seed funding by the UB Office of Curriculum, Assessment, and Teaching Transformation (CATT). This funding will support an innovative interdisciplinary project aimed at enhancing communication between medical professionals and Spanish-speaking patients through a Spanish-language Large Language Model (LLM).
The initiative, rooted in RLL’s "Spanish for Health Professions" program, emphasizes cultural competence alongside linguistic expertise. Unlike conventional language courses, this program integrates health sciences, language pedagogy, and computational language technologies to address communication challenges in healthcare settings
