Christopher L. Camp, M.D.
Mayo Clinic Human Optimization Project: Integrating Human Performance Through AI-Driven Curriculum
Award year: 2025 Richard M. Schulze Scholar in Artificial Intelligence
This project is intentionally universal. It’s not limited to a specific specialty or role. Anyone striving to improve could benefit. If we strengthen well-being, resiliency and performance in those who care for patients, that has clear downstream effects on burnout and care quality.
At a high level, what is your project trying to accomplish?
At its core, we’re building a curriculum to help people become the best versions of themselves.
It’s centered around 10 interconnected domains of human performance — sleep, nutrition, exercise, physical health, leadership, personal growth, cognition, productivity, social connection and well-being. All of these influence how we perform, yet traditionally we try to improve them in silos. You focus on one area, then move to the next, even though they’re deeply intertwined in real life.
Our goal is to integrate all of these domains into one cohesive system so people can grow in a unified way rather than in fragments.
How do artificial intelligence and the digital human fit into that vision?
We think about the project in three phases: content creation, curriculum build and AI integration.
The first phase has been creating the content through a podcast called “Mayo Clinic on Human Optimization.” Each episode focuses on a specific topic within those 10 domains. We’re now more than 50 episodes in, and that content forms the foundation of the larger curriculum.
The second phase is building a comprehensive curriculum — ultimately about 500 topics. That’s a massive undertaking, and we’re partnering with neuRealities, a company focused on using AI-powered digital humans and immersive technology for healthcare workforce training and education, to map and structure it in a way that allows for adaptive learning.
The third phase is the AI and digital human component. My digital human has already been created — and it’s remarkable. I think of that as the “body” of the human. Now we’re building the “brain.” We’ve loaded all of our podcast and educational content into a generative AI system. It’s mapping what it knows, identifying gaps and helping guide future content development.
The long-term vision is that the digital human becomes a personalized human optimization guide — essentially a 24/7 coach, in any language, helping users work through their goals across all 10 domains.
What inspired you to pursue this work?
This started from living in two worlds at the same time.
In 2019, I began overseeing a leadership curriculum for orthopedic surgery residents at Mayo Clinic, which focused on cognitive performance — leadership, stress management, productivity. That same year, I became director of high performance for the Minnesota Twins, where the focus was physical performance — strength, conditioning, injury prevention.
It became obvious that you can’t separate the cognitive from the physical. They’re deeply connected.
At the same time, I saw a common struggle across residents, athletes and really everyone: The bar for performance keeps rising, yet we’re also told to prioritize well-being. It feels like we’re supposed to do more and less at the same time. To me, that’s the universal human tension right now.
This project is about helping people define their “more” — not necessarily more volume, but better quality, better alignment with their values — and then build a system to pursue that sustainably.
What impact do you hope this will have, and how has philanthropy helped move it forward?
This project is intentionally universal. It’s not limited to a specific specialty or role. Anyone striving to improve could benefit. If we strengthen well-being, resiliency and performance in those who care for patients, that has clear downstream effects on burnout and care quality.
But this is something that has never really been built before at Mayo Clinic. There is not an established pathway to plug into. It is new and, in many ways, disruptive.
Because we’re creating the platform, the curriculum and the AI integration from the ground up, philanthropic support has been essential. Without it, we simply wouldn’t be able to move forward at this scale.