Associate Professor
Bio: Dr. Kirk Roberts, Ph.D., M.S., serves as an Associate Professor at the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston. He commenced his tenure as an assistant professor on April 16, 2016, and ascended to his current role on September 1, 2021. Dr. Roberts’s expertise is in natural language processing (NLP)—a field where he has significantly contributed through research that interprets medical language and extracts valuable information from unstructured text. His efforts focus on enhancing the usability of the vast, daily-generated biomedical data, ensuring it benefits researchers, healthcare professionals, and the public. Leading initiatives like the TREC Clinical Decision Support track and earning recognition through awards like the National Library of Medicine Career Development Award, Dr. Roberts is at the forefront of integrating informatics into healthcare, thereby improving the accessibility and applicability of health-related data. His work is pivotal in the progression of healthcare information dissemination and utilization.