I’m delighted to announce that we’ve received one of the President’s Research Excellence Accelerator awards for our proposal entitled “Towards a Conversational Assistant for Patient Prep”! Our virtual patient team including Doug Danforth (College of Medicine), Eric Fosler-Lussier (CSE) and William Schuler (Linguistics) will be expanded to include Subhankar Chakraborty (Wexner Medical Center) for this effort. The aim of the project is to take initial steps towards developing an automated conversational assistant that can help patients properly prepare for medical procedures. This assistant will need to go beyond the capabilities of our virtual patient system in pro-actively engaging users and integrating information over extended interactions.