Professor Catherine Blake is one of ten faculty members from across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus who have been selected by the Carle Illinois College of Medicine as Health Innovation Professors (HIP). The new HIP faculty will collaborate with Carle Illinois students, physicians, and other health care providers to pursue new frontiers in health-related research and innovation, creating new opportunities for funding from government agencies, industry, and foundations. The new faculty members will also pioneer advancements in medical education and the integration of health-related concepts into undergraduate and graduate courses across the UIUC campus.
Blake currently serves as program director of the MS in information management and the MS in bioinformatics. Her active projects include leading the National Science Foundation’s Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH), developing health data literacy ambassadors, and applying text mining methods to privacy standards in the Cloud. Blake’s research explores both human and automated methods to synthesize evidence from text to extract key findings from empirical studies in medicine, toxicology, and epidemiology. She holds a PhD and MS in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine, and an MS and BS in computer science from the University of Wollongong, Australia.
"I am very much looking forward to engaging with the Carle Illinois College of Medicine community on all fronts," said Blake. "The HIP appointment provides a great opportunity to share the methods that I have been developing to automatically synthesize evidence from text and to foster sustained collaborations to extend this line of research."