Director of Centre for Digital Tranformarion of Health, University of Melbourne 
After studying linguistics, I received my PhD from the University of Utah in Medical Informatics with a research focus in natural language processing (NLP). I spent ten years at the University of Pittsburgh and moved to the University of California, San Diego in 2010. My work has mainly addressed extraction of information from clinical reports, including identifying evidence of acute bacterial pneumonia from chest radiography reports and evidence of conditions relevant to detecting disease outbreaks from emergency department reports. I have developed an information extraction system called Topaz that maps text to concepts from a user's knowledge base and uses the ConText algorithm to assign attribute values for negation, experiencer, and historicity. I led the American Medical Informatics Association NLP Working Group from 2008 until 2012 and am collaborating on efforts to develop shared conventions and resources for NLP. I am working on several collaborative grants creating visualization tools for NLP output and developing infrastructure for NLP development and application.