Dr. Chute established the Division of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic, overseeing a program of applied research and development focusing upon clinical and genomic data sources, management, standardization, and interpretation. He was Division Chair for 20 years, stepping down in 2008. His research focus is in the domain of biomedical terminology and ontology, with a long-standing emphasis upon scalable terminology services that can be used across biology and medicine. He is principal investigator on the LexGrid project, an open-source implementation and framework for the ANSI and ISO standard Common Terminology Services through HL7. This work has been adopted by Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG) at NCI. LexGrid also provides the core infrastructure for the NIH Roadmap project at the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies (NCBO).

Dr. Chute has recently established a research agenda in standardized clinical phenotypes, manifest in his role as PI on a major NHGRI Cooperative Agreement for phenotype extraction from Electronic Medical Records associated with Genome Wide Associated Genotypes (eMERGE Network).

To make informatics principles truly applicable across the coalescing communities of biological research and medical practice, a strong engagement must be made with standards for biohealth data interchange and interoperability. A partial list of academic standards and NIH review activities Dr. Chute has undertaken includes:

Dr. Chute is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and is an elected Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Epidemiology, and the American College of Medical Informatics.