Kirk Roberts

Kirk Roberts, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, UTHealth Houston. He specializes in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on clinical information extraction, spatial information extraction, and medical information retrieval. His work bridges computer science, medicine, linguistics, and machine learning to improve accessibility and usability of biomedical data.

Education: PhD (2013) and MS (2009) in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas; BS (2005) in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Research emphasizes NLP applications for healthcare, including question-answering systems, EHR analysis, and spatial relation extraction. He leads the TREC Clinical Decision Support track and has been recognized with a National Library of Medicine Career Development Award. His contributions span over 20 peer-reviewed publications in journals like JAMIA and conferences such as ACL and AMIA.

Key areas include: advancing clinical decision support via NLP, optimizing biomedical literature retrieval, and improving health data dissemination through natural language systems.