Wendy Chapman, PhD

Dr Chapman earned her Bachelor's degree in Linguistics and her PhD in Medical Informatics from the University of Utah. She was a postdoctoral fellow in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh, then joined the faculty there. At the time of her election, she was an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Intelligent Systems. In this role, she has applied her skills in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to the field of Biosurveillance, and in this context has contributed significantly to our understanding of the strengths and limitations of syndromic case detection from chief complaints recorded in electronic medical records. She also served as associate director of the graduate training program at the University of Pittsburgh. With colleagues, Dr Chapman has developed algorithms and tools to facilitate sharing and information extraction from clinical reports, including the widely-used NegEx algorithm for detecting negation and the De-ID data scrubbing system. At the time of her election she was chair of the AMIA NLP working group and developed a NLP repository of de-identified clinical reports that is available to other researchers. Her election to the College recognizes these sustained technical and organizational contributions to the field.