Expertise and Research Interests:

Chris is a senior systems architect in the Lexical Systems Group (LSG) at the NIH/NLM. His expertise includes tuning software development process, architecture specification, analysis, design, implementation, testing and mentoring. He received his PhD in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Design (CIMAD) in the mechanical engineering department from University of Maryland.

He leads many natural language processing (NLP) projects at the NIH/NLM, including the public releases of the UMLS SPECIALIST Lexicon and Lexical Tools, Visual Tagging Tools (VTT), SubTerm Mapping Tools (STMT), MEDLINE N-gram Set (MNS), Text Categorization Tool (TC) and Spell Checker for Consumer Language (CSpell). He is a member of AMIA, ACM and Academia.

 

Honors and Awards:

• 2020 NLM Group Award: Early Access of COVID-19 Terms for the Indexing Initiative Tools
• 2019 JAMIA Editor's Choice Paper Award: Spell checker for consumer language (CSpell)
• 2017 HealthInfo Best Paper Award Candidate: Generating A Distilled N-Gram Set: Effective Lexical Multiword Building in the SPECIALIST Lexicon
• 2016 HealthInfo Best Poster Award: Generating SD-Rules in the SPECISLIST Lexical Tools - Optimization for Suffix Derivation Rule Set
• 2012 AMIA Distinguished Poster Award: Development of Sub-Term Mapping Tools (STMT)