Özlem Uzuner

Özlem Uzuner, department chair of Information Sciences and Technology, speaks three languages—English, French, and Turkish—but it’s her fourth language that could help save lives.

Uzuner is an expert in natural language processing, a field of computer science that involves turning human language into coded form. She is working on algorithms that translate physicians’ narratives about their patients into data that can be analyzed to find better treatments.

Uzuner is also a research affiliate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT. She specializes in Natural Language Processing and its applications to real-world problems, including healthcare and policy. Her current research interests include information extraction from fragmented and ungrammatical narratives for capturing meaning, studies of consumer-generated text such as social media and electronic petitions, and semantic representation development for phenotype prediction, fraud detection, and topic modeling. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Libraries of Medicine, National Institutes of Mental Health, Office of the National Coordinator, and by industry.

ORCID: 0000-0001-8011-9850

Degrees

• PhD, Technology Management and Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• MEng, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research Interests

• Natural Language Processing
• Health Informatics
• Public Health Informatics
• Mental Health Informatics
• Computational Social Science