Karin Verspoor

Professor Karin Verspoor works at the intersection of Science and Technology, applying artificial intelligence methods to analysis and interpretation of biological and clinical data, focusing particularly on natural language processing of unstructured text data.

She is currently the Dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University, and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. She is also the Deputy Director of the ARC ITTC in Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies, and a co-founder and Victoria node lead of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.

Karin was previously a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne and Director of Health Technologies in the Melbourne School of Engineering, as well as the Deputy Director of the University's Centre for Digital Transformation of Health. Prior to that, she was a Principal Researcher at NICTA's Victoria Research Lab and served as the Scientific Director for Health and Life Sciences. Karin headed a research team at NICTA in Biomedical Informatics.

Karin moved to Melbourne in December 2011 from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Computational Pharmacology and Faculty on the Computational Bioscience Program. She also spent five years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, nearly five years in start-ups during the US Tech Bubble, and a year as a Research Fellow at Macquarie University. She received her undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Rice University (Houston, TX) and her MSc and PhD degrees in Cognitive Science and Natural Language from the University of Edinburgh (UK).