Keynotes
Olivier Bodenreider, Acting Director, LHNCBC, National Library of Medicine, NIH
Dr. Olivier Bodenreider is a Senior Scientist and Acting director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. His research focuses on terminology and ontology in the biomedical domain, both from a theoretical perspective (quality assurance, interoperability) and in their application to natural language processing, knowledge discovery and information integration. Dr. Bodenreider is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. He received a M.D. degree from the University of Strasbourg, France in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from the University of Nancy, France in 1993. Before joining NLM in 1996, he was assistant professor for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Nancy, France, Medical School.
Karin Verspoor, Dean, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University
Dr. Karin Verspoor works at the intersection of Science and Technology, applying computation to the analysis and interpretation of biological and clinical data. Her research primarily focuses on the use of artificial intelligence methods to enable biological discovery and clinical decision support, through the extraction of information from clinical texts and the biomedical literature, and machine learning-based modeling. Dr. Verspoor is currently Executive Dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She previously was a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as well as the Deputy Director of the University’s Health and Biomedical Informatics Centre, and before that a Principal Researcher at NICTA’s Victoria Research Lab serving as the Scientific Director for Health and Life Sciences and lead of the Biomedical Informatics team. Dr. Verspoor moved to Melbourne in December 2011 from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Computational Pharmacology and Faculty on the Computational Bioscience Program. She also spent five years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, nearly five years in start-ups during the US Tech Bubble, and a year as a Research Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney. She received her undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Sciences from Rice University (Houston, TX) and her MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Cognitive Science and Natural Language from the University of Edinburgh (UK).
Panelists
Dr. Chunhua Weng is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and an elected fellow of both American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). She has been co-leading the Biomedical Informatics Resource for the Columbia CTSA (The Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Science) since 2011. She is also an Associate Editor for Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Weng holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical and Health Informatics from University of Washington at Seattle. As an active researcher in the field of Clinical Research Informatics since 2000, Dr. Weng has published on data-driven optimization of clinical trial eligibility criteria, scalable and portable electronic phenotyping, electronic health records (EHR) data quality assessment and data analytics, and text knowledge engineering using a variety of text (e.g., EHR narratives, PubMed abstracts and clinical trial summaries).
Melissa Haendel is the Chief Research Informatics Officer and Marsico Chair in Data Science at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and Director of the Center for Data to Health (CD2H). Her background is molecular genetics, developmental biology, and toxicology as well as translational informatics, with a focus over the past decade on open science and semantic engineering. Dr. Haendel’s vision is to weave together healthcare systems, basic science research, and patient generated data through development of data integration technologies and innovative data capture strategies. Dr. Haendel’s research has focused on integration of genotype-phenotype data to improve rare disease diagnosis and mechanism discovery.
Dr. Trevor Cohen trained and practiced as a physician in South Africa, before obtaining his PhD in 2007 in Medical Informatics at Columbia University. His doctoral work focused on an approach to enhancing clinical comprehension in the domain of psychiatry, leveraging distributed representations of psychiatric clinical text. Upon graduation, he joined the faculty at Arizona State University’s nascent Department of Biomedical Informatics, where he contributed to the development of curriculum for informatics students, as well as for medical students at the University of Arizona’s Phoenix campus. In 2009 he joined the faculty at the University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics, where (amongst other things) he developed a NLM-funded research program concerned with leveraging knowledge extracted from the biomedical literature for information retrieval and pharmacovigilance, and contributed toward large-scale national projects such as the Office of the National Coordinator’s SHARP-C initiative, which supported a range of research projects that aimed at improving the usability and comprehensibility of electronic health record interfaces. In 2018 he joined the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he continues to pursue these lines of research, amongst others.