Glenn T. Gobbel, DVM, PhD

Dr. Gobbel is a Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics with a secondary appointment in Medicine at Vanderbilt University.  He is also a Health Services Research Scientist within the Tennessee Valley Health System (TVHS) VA.  Dr. Gobbel earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) from the University of Florida and his PhD in biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco.  After working as a basic researcher in the fields of radiation biology for over 15 years, where his work focused on the pathophysiology of brain injury and mechanisms of repair, Dr. Gobbel completed a fellowship in Medical Informatics at TVHS and also earned an MS in Biomedical Informatics from Vanderbilt University.  His current research work focuses on the development of near-real time natural language processing (NLP) tools for extraction of medical information from clinical documents.  A key interest of Dr. Gobbel is the generation of algorithms that improve the performance and enhance the clinical utility and usability of NLP tools.

Dr. Gobbel has successfully competed for extramural funding from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders (NINDS) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the roles of principal investigator and project leader.  Funded research grants have included awards under the First Award (R29), Exploratory/Development Grant Award (R21), and Program Project Award (P01; Project leader) programs as well as a number of foundation awards.  He is currently a co-investigator on a number of nationally funded projects involving the use of NLP for population health informatics. His work has resulted in authorship of 49 peer reviewed manuscripts, serving as first author on 19 of those articles, which have been published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Journal of Neuroscience, Cancer Research, and Stroke.  Dr. Gobbel has also co-authored 4 book chapters and multiple meeting abstracts and posters.   He is a member of the American Medical Informatics Association, and he is an active reviewer for a number of journals and the annual meeting of the American Medical Informatics Association.