I am a scientist working in the area of natural language processing (NLP/NLProc) focused on improving information extraction methods for biomedical data utilizing machine learning and deep learning methods. I currently work as a Research Scientist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics. I have over 7 years of experience in building NLP and Machine Learning applications in areas such as Epidemiology, Phylogeography and Pharmacovigilance among others. My current expertise is in developing tools for using traditional health data (such as clincal notes and research studies) in combination with non-traditional health data (such as social media and wastewater) for gathering public health signals.

Before joining my current role, I received my PhD in Biomedical Informatics in 2019 with advisors Dr. Matthew Scotch (Arizona State University) and Dr. Graciela Gonzalez (University of Pennsylvania). I received my Master of Science (MS) degree in Computer Science in 2016. In what could be considered my life prior to building tensorflow/pytorch models, I worked as a Software Developer at IBM building enterprise cloud computing software.