Christopher Camp, M.D. (MED ’10, OR ’15), is on a collective mission to help people live intentionally, consistently better.
Christopher Camp, M.D. (MED ’10, OR ’15), wears many hats. While Dr. Camp’s clinical practice is sports medicine surgery, he — like many other Mayo physicians — is involved in teaching, research and administrative roles. He also is the medical director for Content Innovation in the Mayo Clinic School of Continuous Professional Development. He has had a long tenure at Mayo Clinic — one that started when he arrived as a medical student in 2006. He also completed a residency at Mayo. Save for the two years he was a Mayo Clinic Scholar at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, Dr. Camp has spent the better part of the last 20 years at Mayo.
Planting a seed
The genesis for a project — which aims to help people do more of what they love, while avoiding burnout and preserving their mental, physical and emotional health — came more recently. In 2019, Dr. Camp started a leadership curriculum for Mayo residents, which covered cognitive aspects of performance such as productivity, personal growth and leadership. That same year, he became the medical director and director of High Performance for the Minnesota Twins Major League Baseball team, where he oversees medical decisions, performs surgeries and attends the team’s games. His role also encompasses the medical needs of the entire Twins organization, including more than 200 Minor League players.
“The vision for the project is to ‘help as many people as possible become the best humans they can be so they can give their gifts back to the world.’ That’s the main driver behind every decision we make.”
Christopher Camp, M.D
As the director of High Performance, Dr. Camp oversees a whole gamut of professionals who take care of the team, including athletic trainers, physical therapists, strength coaches, nutritionists, sports psychologists, massage therapists, sleep hygienists and many more. The combination of the cognitive work that Dr. Camp was engaging in to help Mayo residents perform better and the physical work that he was immersed in with the Minnesota Twins confirmed one thing he had known for a long time.
“You can’t separate them,” he says. “The cognitive and the physical are very much interlinked. The bar for performance is higher than it has ever been, so we feel pressure to do more. We also recognize the value of sleep, recovery and wellness. So, we feel pressure to do less. We have to do more and less at the same time.”
Those conflicting messages can be confusing and make heads spin, Dr. Camp says.
Addressing a pressing challenge
The challenge before him: How can the cognitive and physical aspects of the human experience be merged to provide a comprehensive approach to better performance all around? That isn’t all. Dr. Camp has an ambitious goal to develop a curriculum that will not only serve Mayo medical residents and the Minnesota Twins organization, but be scalable so that it can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world. Every square inch of a whiteboard that hangs in his office is covered in yellow sticky notes that highlight the in-depth research he has done to help identify recurring themes that influence human performance. Dr. Camp’s research showed that, in order to live intentionally and consistently improve their lives, people needed to feel balanced in these areas (in no particular order):
- Physical health
- Personal growth
- Nutrition
- Cognition
- Exercise
- Social/interpersonal skills
- Wellness
- Leadership
- Sleep
- Productivity
The current approach to improving in these areas is limited because the educational content lives in silos. This leads people to become one-dimensional because they tend to focus solely on one of the domains.
“If you want to improve sleep, you find one set of resources or behaviors,” Dr. Camp says. “And if you want to learn about leadership, you put all that down and you do leadership stuff. In real life, all these things are interconnected. So, the educational content needs to be connected as well.” Individuals needed individual paths to optimal lives. One size wouldn’t fit all. Flexible learning would be key to success.
With the 10 domains of optimal human performance and the challenges identified, a partnership with Mayo Clinic School of Continuous Professional Development was formed, and the Mayo Clinic on Human Optimization project was born.
Hopping to it
The project is a forward-thinking approach to helping meet people where they are. The concept is about helping people continue to achieve more — with the definition of more being defined by the individual — while simultaneously improving their well-being.
Dr. Camp and the Mayo Clinic School of Continuous Professional Development have created a Mayo Clinic Human Optimization podcast available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube that covers nearly 50 topics under each of the 10 domains — a staggering 500 in total. This year, they are launching “pod-clubs” — think book clubs, but for podcasts — that offer discussion prompts for individuals or teams to work together toward goals. These can be done in focused pathways where people can pick or choose topics that are tailored to their needs. Many groups at Mayo and outside of the organization are already using this on a path to become their best selves. There have been more than 95,000 downloads of the podcasts — and that’s just by word of mouth. Mayo Clinic School of Continuous Professional Development is now partnering with Mayo Clinic Press to further produce and expand the podcasts, going forward.
Doubling up on promise to deliver
“Our target audience is ‘any human looking to improve’,” Dr. Camp says. “The vision for the project is to ‘help as many people as possible become the best humans they can be so they can give their gifts back to the world.’ That’s the main driver behind every decision we make.”
Doubling up to deliver on the promise, Dr. Camp and his team have partnered with two companies to create a high-fidelity digital twin in his likeness. Brahma AI Studio built the digital human itself. Using Brahma’s ATMAN platform, they captured Dr. Camp with 3D photogrammetry to replicate his facial identity, voice, emotional nuance and on-screen realism. The technology draws from high-end film production methods, bringing that level of fidelity and control into healthcare and professional settings. The process is repeatable, meaning other Mayo experts can be twinned the same way.
Mayo Clinic is also leading the work with neuRealities in building “the brain.” Ground, the neuRealities contextual intelligence platform, anchors existing AI models to Mayo Clinic institutional knowledge within a governed, secure environment. That grounding enables reliable, traceable responses aligned to approved sources, and it powers the Mayo Clinic on Human Optimization project behind the scenes.
The goal is to use AI as an agent that helps users decide where to start. The expert digital human is being engineered for conversational, empathetic engagement, meeting users where they are and guiding next steps from prompts like “What are you good at? What do you love? What do you want to work on? What do you want to change?”
The AI agent will serve as a guide to the virtual curriculum to walk users through the content and adapt it based on their specific needs. It will also be able to create content customized specifically to each person. Eventually, Dr. Camp is planning on using the AI agent to join in pod-club discussions for those who wish to use it. Similarly, there are plans for the AI agent to serve as a virtual co-host of the podcast. English isn’t your native language? No problem. The digital double will be fluent in multiple languages to help navigate questions or concerns.
“It’s going to be a lot smarter than I am,” Dr. Camp says. “And I think it will be able to help people in ways that are very tailored and specific to their individual needs.”
If all of this makes you a tad bit uncomfortable, Dr. Camp gets it. The system is being built with careful guardrails, appropriately limited reach, and the ability to opt in or out of using the digital twin.
Collaborating to connect people everywhere
For many years, Dr. Camp had been working on his own to address the challenges he had identified. In 2025, the Mayo Clinic School of Continuous Professional Development became involved as the primary partner in the project. More recently, other groups at Mayo such as Mayo Clinic Press are helping to grow the podcast. The work of the pod-clubs is being funded through a grant from the Mayo Clinic People and Culture Committee with a focus on reaching as much of the Mayo workforce as possible.
Dr. Camp, a Mayo Clinic Richard M. Schulze Scholar in Artificial Intelligence, was selected for a 2025 Individual Scholar Award that is partially funding the creation of his digital twin. The award is made possible by a generous gift from the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation.
Can-do attitude
Dr. Camp wants people everywhere to know that if they are struggling to do more and less at the same time, it can be done.
“It’s not easy, but it is possible. It’s not just possible, it’s essential,” he says. “You can continue to achieve at a high level and, simultaneously, improve your well-being,” he says.
Dr. Camp encourages everyone to “take time to truly understand yourself.”
“Define what you want and what success will look like,” he says. “Pick an area to focus on. Get some like-minded people together. Listen to the topics most relevant to you. Work through the discussion questions with a group. And celebrate your progress at every step of the way.”
