PostDoc Position Available in Digital Health

We are seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow that will contribute to innovative research developments within the scope of digital health. The project aims to devise new method for the effective and efficient information extraction from electronic medical records. The position is part of a newly BDHP/MRFF funded research project that involves researchers at the University of Queensland, Metro North HHS and Metro South HHS (Queensland Health). The postdoc will be part of the ielab team (http://ielab.io), in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering.

Project Description

In the near future, all public hospitals in Queensland will share one integrated Electronic Medical Record (iEMR). It contains an extensive and rich repository of structured and unstructured information that could be used to facilitate clinical practice improvement and clinical research. However, it is extremely difficult and labour intensive to access this data in order to use it for these purposes. This research project will streamline this process that will not only be useful within Queensland, but to all health care providers that use similar EMRs, worldwide. The project will develop a new, efficient capability for data extraction from the ieMR. We will construct a robust data model from the existing iEMR database that collates and indexes information from both the existing structured query language (SQL) fields and currently unindexed, but invaluable unstructured information.

The successful applicant will enrol through the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at The University of Queensland (UQ), and will be a member of the ielab team (www.ielab.io), within the UQ Data Science discipline.

The Data Science discipline researches and develops innovative and practical solutions for business, scientific and social applications in the realm of big data. The group encompasses a variety of research strengths including: Data and knowledge engineering, Information Retrieval, Computer Vision, and Complex and Intelligent Systems. You will join a world-leading research group currently composed of 13 academic staff members (including 4 full professors, two DECRA fellows and an Advanced Queensland Fellow), 7 research fellows and over 40 PhD students. Members of the group have a successful track record of publishing in top conferences and journals such as ACM SIGIR, ACM CIKM, The Web Conference (WWW), SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, ICDM, KDD and various ACM and IEEE transactions.

The research environment available to the project is world-class. The University of Queensland (UQ) has a strong and internationally focused research culture. It is ranked in the top 1% of world universities in three widely publicized international University rankings. The areas of research in these PhD projects have a strategic fit within UQ’s existing research strengths in Data Science.

Brisbane is a liveable, capital city with great weather, vibrant green spaces, lively bars and restaurants, world-class art galleries and premier events. It is the third most populous city in Australia and is closed to premier recreational locations such as the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast.

Successful applicants should possess a PhD in the field of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, or Machine Learning on Textual Data.

POSITION NOW FILLED