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.