Arlene Casey

Arlene Casey is a Vivensa Foundation Senior Research Fellow at the Usher Institute within the University of Edinburgh's College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. With over 18 years of industry experience in pharmaceutical research and a PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP) from Edinburgh (2020), she specializes in developing algorithms for responsible use of unstructured health data in secure environments.

• Roles: NLP Programme Lead and Principal NLP Data Scientist at DataLoch
• Education: B.Sc (Hons) in Mathematics for Business Analysis, M.Sc (Distinction), PhD in NLP

Her research focuses on applying NLP and machine learning to uncover hidden patterns in clinical free-text data, particularly for understanding aging, mental health, and risk indicators. Current projects include:

• Proleptic Fellowship with Dunhill Medical Trust (2023-2028, £292,090): Improving prediction models for later-life syndromes
• SARA Project (2023, £478,762): Risk assessment in clinical free-text
• De-identification of narrative EHRs (2022-2023, £170,000)

She leads the MSc Data Science for Health and Social Care program and actively supervises postgraduate students. Awards include the Scottish Health Innovation Conference Best Oral Presentation (2023) and Alan Turing enrichment funding (2022).