Ruth Reeves, PhD

Ruth Madeleine Reeves, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and is affiliated with the Center for Population Health Informatics.  She is also Health Services Research Scientist, Veterans Health Administration, Tennessee Valley Healthcare System.

Dr. Reeves earned her doctorate in linguistics at the City University of New York.  After working in natural language processing (NLP) for over 15 years, where her work experience included computational grammar construction, event recognition technology and co-reference resolution, Dr. Reeves elected to apply her computational linguistics experience to medical informatics. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in medical informatics, while training within the Veteran Affairs (VA) Tennessee Valley Healthcare System and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University.

Her efforts are currently focused on combining information extracted from unstructured text with structured data elements among electronic health records (EHR) to achieve the goal of putting state-of-the-art computed inferencing technology within reach of the health services community of researchers and operations workforce.  Her informatics work is designed to provide true temporal reasoning to support automated inferencing in clinical decision support applications.

Dr. Reeves has competed successfully for grant funding within the VA, and is currently directing a Health Services Research and Development informatics grant focused on NLP temporal reasoning applied to the use-case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She is currently a co-investigator on a number of nationally funded projects involving applying NLP to population health informatics.