Assistant Professor Vetle Torvik participated in the 2015 Conference on Complex Systems, held from September 28 to October 2 in Tempe, Arizona. He spoke at the satellite event, “Quantifying Science,” at which he presented a paper coauthored with GSLIS alumna Laura G. Cruz (MS '15) titled, “Sex-bias in Biomedical Research: a Bibliometric Perspective.”
Abstract: Models of human disease have traditionally been biased towards the male body. Here, we perform a retrospective study of factors that may have contributed to (reducing) this bias across a variety of biomedical topics and study types in the United States during 1987-2009.
The Conference on Complex Systems is an international meeting hosted annually by the Complex Systems Society. The 2015 event was the first meeting hosted in North America and was cosponsored by Arizona State University and the Santa Fe Institute.
Torvik joined the GSLIS faculty in 2011. His areas of expertise include mathematical optimization, computational statistics, text and data mining, literature-based discovery, and bioinformatics. He teaches courses on those topics, as well as informetrics, information processing, and literature-based discovery. Torvik earned a BA in mathematics from St. Olaf College, an MS in operations research from Oregon State University, and a PhD in engineering science from Louisiana State University.