Biomedical Data Science (BDS) Lab - Podcast: Data with a Pulse

Data with a Pulse: The Human Dimension

This podcast is dedicated to uncovering how data shapes human lives, decisions, and communities, and how the human dimension shapes the way we collect, interpret, and act on data. The stories, ethics, and lived realities behind the data's numbers.

Each episode dives into the breakthroughs, challenges, and lived experiences at the heart of healthcare, technology, and social good bringing you conversations that go beyond the numbers to reveal the people and passions driving change.

The Show's Host

Dr. Guy Hembroff, PhD, is a faculty researcher at the intersection of biomedical data science, health informatics, and artificial intelligence. He leads Michigan Tech's College of Computing Biomedical Data Science (BDS) Research Lab, with a multidisciplinary team tackling some of the most pressing challenges in modern healthcare. Dr. Hembroff's research spans deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, generative AI, and cybersecurity, with a focus on ensuring cutting-edge research translates into tangible impact for patients, clinical care, and communities.

Driven by a belief in the power of data and technology to advance human health, Dr. Hembroff brings both technical expertise and a human-centered perspective to every conversation, making him a trusted voice for clinicians, data scientists, policymakers, and communities navigating the rapidly evolving intersection of healthcare, AI, and social good.

Podcast Episodes

To access any of the podcasts, click on the respective episode's viewing option icons (Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts).

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Episode #3: The Regulation Equation - Mastering the Mind with Self-Regulation Expert Brad Chapin

SUMMARY:

In this episode, I sit down with Brad Chapin, M.S., LCP, MLP, who is an author, internationally recognized speaker, and one of the foremost experts in Self-Regulation Training, for a conversation that will fundamentally change how you think about your own mind, your behavior, and your potential for growth.

Brad has spent his career at the intersection of psychology, education, and human development. He is the creator of the Self-Regulation Training System, a research-grounded, cognitive-behavioral framework now used by thousands of educators, clinicians, and mental health professionals across the country. His work begins with a simple but powerful premise: the most transformative skill a person can develop isn't intelligence, talent, or even discipline, it's the ability to regulate themselves.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

🧠 What self-regulation actually is - and why most people confuse it with willpower, discipline, or compliance. Brad breaks down the three core domains ( physical, emotional, and cognitive regulation) and explains how mastering each one unlocks success in every area of life.

⚡ The fight-or-flight trap — why your body's stress response system is the #1 saboteur of your decisions, your relationships, and your mental health, and the two critical skills that allow you to shut it down before it shuts you down.

🎓 Self-regulation and academic performance — the surprising data on how developing regulation skills dramatically improves not just behavior, but learning outcomes, social skills, and long-term life success , and why this is the missing variable in most educational reform conversations.

😰 The anxiety connection — how dysregulation fuels anxiety, why most anxiety interventions miss the root cause, and what Brad's evidence-based framework offers as a real alternative.

🔄 Internal control vs. external management — why 85–90% of our institutional systems are designed to manage people's behavior from the outside, and why Brad advocates for building internally-driven regulation skills instead.

💬 Labeling emotions and cognitive regulation — how something as simple as naming what you feel can interrupt the neurological chain reaction of reactivity, and how to train the cognitive system to stop unhealthy thought patterns before they derail you.

👩‍🏫 A message for every educator, parent, and clinician — why self-regulation is the universal skillset that cuts across every presenting problem (e.g., anger, anxiety, academic failure, relationship conflic) and how to start teaching it tomorrow.

And in our Pulse Check rapid-fire segment: Brad discusses his full-circle moment when he walked the halls of the same inpatient psychiatric facility where, at 17 years old, he was a patient, only to return 25 years later as its Director of Clinical Services. The one practice he's done three times a week for six years that now triggers a measurable physiological calm response the moment he hears the first note (and sometime even before he's begun). What Stranger Things (and a Broadway stage) has to do with proving that people labeled as problems can do a complete 180 when someone actually believes in them. And the one sentence that captures his entire life's philosophy: "Self is the first word in self-regulation, it has to start here."

This is a conversation that will challenge how you think about human behavior, whether you're a clinician, educator, parent, coach, biomedical data scientist, or simply someone who wants to understand the importance of self-regulation in all of our lives.

LINKS:

Books by Brad Chapin, M.S., LCP, MLP mentioned or referenced in this episode:

Self-Regulation Training Programs with Brad Chapin:

1. Self-Regulation Training System — Full Video Course
Includes 18 training modules covering the complete Self-Regulation Training System — from Brad's introduction through all three domains (Physical, Emotional, and Cognitive Regulation) — designed for educators and counselors.

2. Self-Regulation with Brad Chapin — On-Demand Video
Brad discusses the why, what, and how of self-regulation and provides proven methods for increasing success in the face of challenge, including evidence-based emotional control strategies.

3. Teaching Self-Control Skills to Young People — Unlimited Access DVD
A 90-minute webinar-style program with strategies usable with all students, particularly those with behavioral and emotional self-control challenges.

4. Smart Guidance DVD
Brad's Self-Regulation SmartGuidance DVD, designed for use on computers or SMART Boards to teach and reinforce skills from the Self-Regulation Training System.

5. Teaching Self-Regulation to Children — Interactive SmartBoard Lessons
Highly interactive digital lessons by Will Moody and Brad Chapin, designed for computers and digital whiteboards, covering physical, emotional, and cognitive regulation.

6. Self-Regulation Skillset — 7-Week Online Book Study with Brad Chapin
Brad leads participants through his Self-Regulation Skillset for Educators book week by week, with video-guided instruction.

Preview Brad Chapin's Self-Regulation content on YouTube:

DATA WITH A PULSE: THE HUMAN DIMENSION PODCAST

This podcast is about data, humanity, technology and the ideas that can improve how we care for people. The podcasted is hosted by Dr. Guy Hembroff, PhD - a faculty researcher at Michigan Technological University and Director of the ⁠Biomedical Data Science (BDS) Research Lab.⁠

Subscribe, leave a review, and send questions to hembroff.podcast@gmail.com.

Keywords: self-regulation, emotional regulation, cognitive regulation, physical regulation, fight-or-flight response, self-control, cognitive-behavioral psychology, anxiety management, anger management, academic performance, artificial intelligence, biomedical data science, AI, internal control, self-regulation training system, mental health, emotional intelligence, responsible decision-making, self-regulation skillset, behavioral health, educator wellness, adolescent mental health, mindset, resilience

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Episode #2: The Human Algorithm in Healthcare

Summary: In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Thomas Simmer, MD, physician, healthcare architect, and former Chief Medical Officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, for one of the most candid, wide-ranging, and deeply human conversations in healthcare you'll hear this year.

Dr. Simmer spent three decades at the intersection of clinical care, policy, and data-driven transformation. He pioneered the state's Patient-Centered Medical Home program, now a national model, and championed a philosophy that still challenges the industry today: you don't improve healthcare by judging physicians with data. You improve it by supporting them with it.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

🔬 The moment that changed everything — a career-altering encounter with W. Edwards Deming’s book, Out of the Crisis, and the realization that medical harm wasn’t predominantly due to bad doctors. It was about bad processes.

🏥 The real story behind Michigan's PCMH — how a bold idea became the nation's most influential primary care transformation model, and why it almost never happened.

💊 Why financial incentives are killing healthcare — a provocative, evidence-backed argument that rewarding physicians for performance scorecards is not only ineffective but actively destructive to care quality.

🤖 AI in the exam room — where artificial intelligence genuinely augments clinical judgment, where automation bias becomes dangerous, and why "implement and walk away" is the worst thing any healthcare organization can do.

📱 The future of personal health records — are wearables, continuous glucose monitors, and real-time patient data finally bringing us to the era of true longitudinal health records? And what's still standing in the way?

🧠 Mental health and physical health — why treating them as separate systems causes real clinical harm, and what an integrated model of care actually looks like.

👨‍⚕️ A message to the next generation — what every future clinician and biomedical data scientist must understand about what data can and cannot tell you about the patient in front of you.

And in our Pulse Check rapid-fire segment, coffee's surprising role in sparking the Renaissance, the best piece of advice Dr. Simmer ever received, the funniest moment of his executive career, and what he'd be doing if medicine had never called his name.

This is a conversation that will make you think differently about the healthcare system, whether you're a clinician, a patient, health informaticists, biomedical data scientist, a policymaker, or simply someone who wants to understand how the decisions made in boardrooms shape medical care.

Books mentioned in this episode:

1. ⁠Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success⁠

Author: Ken Segall

2. ⁠Out of the Crisis⁠

Author: W. Edwards Deming

3. ⁠Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World⁠

Author: Mark Pendergrast

4. ⁠Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department⁠

Author: Dean Acheson

5. ⁠The Guns of August⁠

Author: Barbara Tuchman

Keywords: Patient-Centered Medical Home, PCMH, healthcare transformation, clinical variation, value-based care, physician reimbursement, population health management, chronic disease management, end-of-life care, patient dignity, evidence-based medicine, artificial intelligence in healthcare, AI augmentation, automation bias, clinical decision support, biomedical data science, health informatics, personal health records, wearable health monitoring, interoperability, mental health integration

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Episode #1: From Bangalore to Michigan's Upper Peninsula—Ram Bagaria on Startups, Grad School, and Guitar as Therapy

Summary: In my conversation with Ram Bagaria, he shares his journey from working in India's Silicon Valley to pursuing a master's degree in data science in the U.S. He discusses the importance of effective soft skills in the technical industry, the challenges of transitioning to graduate school, and the significance of being skilled in both feature engineering and data science model development. Ram also reflects on his entrepreneurial spirit, detailing his early ventures and the launch of his most recent venture, BookSip, an AI-driven platform for books turned into summaries and podcasts. He emphasizes the balance between academic responsibilities and entrepreneurship, cultural adjustments he faced moving to the U.S., and the mental health strategies he employs to cope with stress. The conversation concludes with Ram's aspirations for the future and insights on personal growth and resilience.

Keywords: data science, entrepreneurship, graduate school, analytics, communication, BookSip, mental health, cultural adjustment, industry experience, machine learning

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