Our Team

Passionate about transforming healthcare through innovation, Dr. Chris Longhurst is the visionary leader at the helm of the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation. With a rich background in medicine and informatics, he spearheads groundbreaking initiatives that drive positive change in the digital healthcare landscape, ultimately helping to improve the patient experience.

As combined Chief Medical Officer and Chief Digital Officer, he leads UC San Diego Health’s technology strategy, driving initiatives that advance the infrastructure across UC San Diego and the UC Health system, while also overseeing the clinical activities of the academic medical center.

Dr. Longhurst is also a key faculty member in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Pediatrics in the UC San Diego School of Medicine, maintaining an active clinical practice as a newborn hospitalist and pursuing scholarship in care quality, patient safety, and health informatics.

Before joining UC San Diego Health, Dr. Longhurst served as chief medical information officer for Stanford Children's Health, where he led strategic efforts to improve children's health and provider workflow using information technology. He founded and led the nation's first accredited clinical informatics fellowship at Stanford, where he was a clinical professor of pediatrics and biomedical informatics.

As an advocate for digital health on a broader scale, he has contributed his expertise to industry forums, collaborated with policymakers to shape healthcare legislation, and mentored emerging leaders in the field of digital health.

Dr. Longhurst - an elected fellow of the prestigious American College of Medical Informatics - has authored several publications on using technology and data to improve quality of care.

Keisuke Nakagawa is Director of Strategic Impact & Growth for the Jacobs Center for Health Innovation at UC San Diego Health. He leads new ventures, strategic partnerships, and growth initiatives that accelerate the adoption and scale of innovative health technologies. His work focuses on co-development of novel technologies, validation in clinical settings, and maximizing impact through venture, operations, and policy.

Previously, as Director of Innovation at UC Davis Health, Dr. Nakagawa spearheaded the health system's digital innovation efforts and established an open innovation partnership with Amazon Web Services to launch the world’s first Cloud Innovation Center within an academic medical center. Under his leadership, the center drove advancements in digital health and open innovation, including the development of a digital front door platform that delivered over six million patient messages annually, generating significant savings for the health system. He also collaborated with organizations such as the World Health Organization and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons to create open-source solutions addressing health misinformation and equitable patient-reported outcomes.

Dr. Nakagawa’s diverse background includes launching startups, consulting for pharmaceutical companies, payors, and investors, and contributing to health care legislation such as the Affordable Care Act and the HITECH Act during his tenure at the Congressional Budget Office. He has published extensively on topics including artificial intelligence, autonomous robotic surgery, tissue engineering and health informatics.

A former Fulbright Scholar to Bangladesh, Dr. Nakagawa worked with the country’s largest NGO to develop and scale a national micro health insurance program for rural villagers and pregnant women. He has served on numerous boards and committees including two terms on the National Board of Directors of the Fulbright Association, the HIMSS Innovation Committee, and currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Social Determinants of Health Committee at HIMSS.

Dr. Nakagawa earned his MD from the University of California Davis School of Medicine and holds a B.A. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University.

Dr. Baxter conducts research at the nexus of ophthalmology and biomedical informatics and has specific interests in health information technology integration, multimodal AI models of eye disease, and research training and education programs.

Dr. Clay has served 12 years of service as Chief Medical Information Officer at UC San Diego Health. He is currently associate program director for the clinical informatics fellowship. As associate CMO, his work focuses on patient flow and hospital capacity, and leverages EHR-based tools, clinical decision support, and analytics to standardize workflows and improve metrics in this space.

As Vice Chair of Perioperative Informatics in the Department of Anesthesiology, Dr. Gabriel oversees research efforts related to data science and AI initiatives related to perioperative medicine across all specialty divisions within the department.

Dr. Sitapati serves as a national leader who innovates in applied health informatics with expertise in registries (co-PI of the California Integrated Vital Records System), precision medicine (MPI for NIH All of Us at UCSD), artificial intelligence (risk models, machine learning, LLM), and quality informatics that advances health equity.

Dr. Ming Tai-Seale is a professor and health services researcher whose expertise lies in patient-physician communication, health policy, and the impact of artificial intelligence, information technology and financial incentives on clinical and economic outcomes, patient experience, and physician well-being.