Kevin Lybarger

Dr. Kevin Lybarger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology at George Mason University’s College of Engineering & Computing. He also holds an Affiliate Assistant Professor role at the University of Washington School of Medicine to facilitate collaborative research. His research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and their applications in healthcare, including clinical informatics, health-focused conversational agents, public health, information integrity, and correctional system informatics. Lybarger’s work emphasizes optimizing textual information use for decision-making and driving societal impact through technology.

Lybarger earned his PhD and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Washington and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Seattle University. He collaborates with groups like the University of Washington Biomedical Language Processing (UW BioNLP) and the Transformation, Interpretation and Analysis of Language (TIAL) Group.

His research spans health informatics (e.g., extracting social determinants of health from clinical notes), NLP advancements (e.g., text simplification for medical education), and interdisciplinary challenges like AI-driven cybersecurity and ethical AI applications in probation/parole records analysis. Recent work includes developing machine learning models for surgical site infection identification and improving clinical documentation through voice technologies.

Notable collaborations include projects with the UW BioNLP group on biomedical text processing and participation in the 2022 n2c2 shared task on social determinants of health extraction. His research addresses both technical and ethical dimensions of healthcare NLP, aiming to bridge gaps between computational methods and real-world clinical needs.