School of Information Sciences

Blake to discuss biomedical informatics at Carle Cancer Center

Catherine Blake
Catherine Blake, Professor

Catherine Blake, associate professor and associate director of the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, will give a presentation at the Carle Cancer Center in Urbana on May 18.

She will give the talk, "Learning Health Systems that Leverage Informatics and Communities of Practice."

Abstract: The Institute of Medicine defines a Learning Health system as "science, informatics, incentives, and culture are aligned for continuous improvement and innovation, with best practices seamlessly embedded in the delivery process and new knowledge captured as an integral by-product of the delivery experience." This talk will describe two critical components to realize this vision. The first part of the talk will introduce the Claim Framework where text mining is used to extract key results from scientific literature. The second part will describe a joint project with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs where communities of practice are needed to leverage clinical data for both research and operational improvements.

Blake was named the iSchool's Centennial Scholar for 2017-2018, in recognition of her pioneering approaches to better integrate and advance understanding of medical research results. She served as a 2016-2017 Faculty Fellow at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, a research and development unit of the National Library of Medicine, where she worked on projects in semantic knowledge representation and medical ontology research. 

At the iSchool, Blake teaches text mining, an introductory course on databases, evidence-based discovery, and foundations of socio-technical data analytics. Prior to coming to Illinois in 2009, Blake was an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She holds an MS and PhD in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine, and a BS and MS in computer science from the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers to present at ASSETS 2025

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 27th International Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) ACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025), which will be held in Denver, Colorado, October 26–29, 2025. This conference allows researchers to present their scholarship on design, evaluation, use, and education related to computing for people with disabilities and older adults.

Chan to give an invited talk on "Predatory Data"

Professor Anita Say Chan will give an invited lecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB) on October 23. The talk, part of the "Confronted with America" series hosted by the Center for American Studies and Research, will be moderated by Jihad Touma, founding director of AUB's School of Computing and Data Sciences.

Anita Say Chan

iSchool researchers present at ILA 2025

School faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 2025 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference, which will be held on October 14–16 in Rosemont. The theme of this year's conference is "You Belong Here."

Craig named Illinois Library Luminary

Anne Craig, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior director of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), has been inducted as an Illinois Library Luminary. The Illinois Library Luminary program, an initiative of the Illinois Library Association (ILA), recognizes those who have made a significant contribution to Illinois libraries.

Anne Craig

iSchool researchers present at CSCW 2025

Several faculty, students, and recent grads will present their research at the 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2025), which will be held October 18–22 in Bergen, Norway. The online portion of the conference will be held on October 10. 

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top