Dr. Davis Austria

Dr. Austria has spent much of his career in health technology, building systems, implementing them in clinical settings, and teaching the people who work in the field. His research looks at whether these systems actually serve the people most often overlooked when technology is designed.

That focus is personal. He understands what it is like to be left out by technology that was not built with people like him in mind, and he brings that perspective to the communities this work centers.

The // DoubleSlash is a youth participatory action research project. It works with young people from racial, ethnic, and sexual minority communities to co-design AI-powered mental health tools, so the young people most affected by them help build them rather than only being studied. The project is developing an algorithmic agency framework to guide that work. Dr. Austria leads it at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation's only Catholic HBCU.