Catherine Blake

Catherine Blake is a Professor at the School of Information Sciences and a Health Innovation Professor at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Computer Science and affiliations with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Personalized Nutrition Initiative, and Center for Health Informatics.

Education:

• PhD in Information and Computer Science from University of California, Irvine
• Master's and Bachelor's in Computer Science from University of Wollongong

Research Interests: Dr. Blake specializes in biomedical informatics, natural language processing, and evidence-based discovery, focusing on synthesizing evidence from text using the Claim Framework to extract findings from empirical studies. Her work extends to text mining in humanities, socio-technical systems, and FATE principles in data science.

Scientific Awards:

• California Breast Cancer Research Program Dissertation Award (2002-2004)
• Computing Research Association MRO-W Program (2007-2008)
• RENCI Faculty Fellows Program (2007-2008)
• UNC Junior Faculty Award (2007)

Teaching & Advising: She teaches database design (IS455) and text mining (IS567), and has developed the Socio-technical Data Analytics (SODA) specialization. Her advisees include doctoral students Ryan Wang, George Vazquez, Don Keefer, and Jaemin Yang, and former students Jooho Lee (University of Chicago), Henry Gabb (Intel), and Ana Lucic (UIUC Applied Research Institute).

Labs & Collaborations: Dr. Blake leads the National Science Foundation's Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) and collaborates with UIUC Extension, CISCO, and John Deere on health data literacy and privacy analysis projects.