Every leader gets a chief of staff.
Except, somehow, you.
The Academic AI Chief of Staff Build — six private 1:1 sessions over Zoom where you build a personal AI chief of staff for the work around the work: mentorship, scholarship, committees, teaching, and the promotion packet. Real fluency you keep. No patient data, ever.
Built by two physicians. Private by design — ask the questions you’d never ask in a faculty meeting.
The EHR has an entire industry. The rest of your job has you.
You carry the mentorship, the committees, the letters, the teaching prep, the talks, and the promotion packet — usually without an assistant, a system, or a spare hour to build one.
Scattered context.
Every letter, agenda, and mentee check-in restarts from a blank page, because the context lives in forty places.
Follow-through has no home.
The commitments you make in meetings outlive your memory of making them.
The packet never writes itself.
Years of mentoring, teaching, and service — and none of it accumulates anywhere that helps you at promotion time.
Six sessions. One working chief of staff.
You don’t watch a course. You build, on your own machine, with your own real work — guided 1:1 by a physician who has built the same thing.
AI foundations.
Beyond search: Claude and Claude Code, working with images and files, organizing your knowledge base.
Executive assistant.
Your daily and weekly operating rhythm.
The board of directors.
Advisors on demand for hard decisions.
The promotion packet.
Daily work that accumulates into evidence.
Manage clinician-self.
CME hours, recertification, your own learning plan.
Manage learners.
Mentee tracking; even building teaching slides.
Manage scholarship.
Manuscripts, reviews, and the writing queue.
Chair’s promotion-letter assistant, publication updater, admin tooling — things graduates build in-house for their departments. Not a service we sell.
How the Build works
Six weekly 1:1 sessions on Zoom.
Just you and a physician guide. No cohort to keep up with, no one watching you learn.
You build with your real work.
Your committee, your mentees, your packet — not toy examples.
You keep the system — and the fluency.
The durable outcome is judgment: knowing what to hand to AI, what to keep human, and how to keep adapting as the tools change.
No patient data, ever.
The Build is strictly nonclinical — no EHR access, no patient records, no clinical inbox. That’s not a limitation; it’s the design. Your chief of staff runs on the professional side of your life, with clear boundaries you set and understand.
Judgment-free by design. It’s just you on the Zoom. Build fluency privately, at your own pace, before you ever have to look fluent in public.
Two trees, one root.
Two Trees MD is two siblings, two branches of medicine. Michelle Lin, MD is an emergency physician and professor at UCSF, and the founder of ALiEM. CT Lin, MD is an internal-medicine chief medical information officer who has spent two decades bringing clinicians and technology to terms. Between them: a career of teaching physicians new tools without the hype.
Michelle Lin, MD
Emergency medicine · UCSF
CT Lin, MD
Internal medicine · CMIO
Made for the mid-career and senior faculty member
- You carry significant mentorship, committee, teaching, and leadership load
- You have no EA — and no system that survives a busy week
- You’re curious about AI but have no desire to become a technologist
- You want fluency from someone who understands academic medicine
- You can commit to a short, high-touch build
Not another AI scribe. Your academic chief of staff.
Not a course you finish. Fluency you keep building.
Start with a conversation.
A short intro call — what you’re carrying, what you’d build first, and whether the Build is a fit.
Book an intro call