Reed McEwan

Reed McEwan

VCRC 302
Minneapolis, MN 55455
United States

Ever since learning his first computer programming language, Reed has enjoyed exploring and applying new technologies, application frameworks, and software engineering techniques to automate processes and increase productivity. This set of passions has helped make possible a rewarding career in information technology in the teaching and research missions at the University of Minnesota. Specializing in languages that run on JVM, database design, and modeling, he has held positions in the Department of Earth Sciences, Office of Information Technology, Masonic Cancer Center, and now in the NLP/IE research group.

NLP/IE membership is an exciting opportunity to learn from an accomplished and engaged group of informatics professionals researching new techniques and applying natural language processing and information extraction in the context of an electronic medical record (EMR) system. One of his first tasks is to assist the group to design and deploy a performant and secure Google-like search interface to help University of Minnesota CTSI researchers find meaningful information and relationships among the unstructured EMR notes processed by the group’s open source BIOMEDICUS NLP pipeline software. As his knowledge of the health informatics NLP domain grows, he hopes to pursue novel research ideas to further the expertise of the group and assist others at the University in applying NLP techniques to their biomedical and health informatics research projects.

Prior to joining the NLP/IE group Reed served as technical and software architect for the Oncology Medical Informatics and Services (OMIS) group in the Masonic Cancer Center where he was responsible for the techical infrastructure supporting data analytics, and the design and development of web applications supporting clinical trials.

Outside of health informatics he is co-principal investigator on an NSF geoinformatics grant through the Department of Earth Sciences where he applies informatics to the creation of online resources used by investigators conducting climate change research.

Education

Senior Research Developer,
AHC Office of Information Systems
, Academic Health Center

Member of NLP/IE Group, Institute for Health Informatics

MS, University of Minnesota (Geochemistry/Structural Geology), 1991

MS, University of Minnesota (Software Engineering), 2008

BA, Magna Cum Laude, Colgate University (Geology), 1986