A Systematic Approach to Building Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Automated Extraction of Data from Clinical Reports

Dr. Joyce Niland is the first holder of the Edward & Estelle Alexander Endowed Chair in Information Sciences at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center. She received her Bachelor's degree in Human Biology from Stanford University, a Master's degree in Physical Therapy from the University of Southern California (USC) and Master's and Doctoral degrees in Biometry from USC. She is an Associate Director of City of Hope Cancer Center, Full Professor in the Beckman Research Institute, and adjunct professor in the USC Keck School of Medicine. Dr. Niland chairs the Department of Information Sciences, including the Divisions of Biostatistics, Clinical Research Information Management, and Research Informatics and Systems. In 2013 she was promoted to Chief Research Information Officer for City of Hope.

Dr. Niland has over 30 years of experience collaborating in translational research. She has published more than 140 biomedical research papers, numerous book chapters, and a text on informatics tools for clinical trials. She directed the National Comprehensive Cancer Center Network Outcomes Research Data Coordinating Center (DCC) for 15 years, and currently directs national DCCs for the Integrated Islet Distribution Program for Type 1 diabetes research, the Intestinal Stem Cell research consortium, and the Human Islet Research Network. Dr. Niland is on advisory boards for the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), the Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (CSDA) journal, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) CancerLinq system. She is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and has served as Vice President of ASA and Scientific Secretary of the International Association of Statistical Computing. In 2004 she received the City of Hope Medical and Scientific Achievement award for her contributions to biomedical research.