Thomas Rindflesch, PhD

Dr. Rindflesch received his bachelorís degree in Arabic and masterís and PhD degrees in linguistics, all from the University of Minnesota. He then went to the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, where he has been working as a computational linguist since 1991. There he has developed and demonstrated the effectiveness of techniques for combining relatively simple ëëminimum commitmentíí (otherwise known as ëëshallowíí) text parsing with electronic domain knowledge to extract domain concepts and interpret their relationships in biomedical text. Dr. Rindflesch has worked effectively with a wide variety of collaborators to make steady progress on developing programs that extract usable semantic information from text and has made his tools readily available for use by other researchers. He has also applied them to operational systems at the NLM, for example, using natural language processing techniques on the published clinical trials literature to audit compliance with registration of National Institutes of Health clinical trials in ClinicalTrials.gov. Dr. Rindfleschís election to the College recognizes the substantial impact his contributions have had on the productivity of other researchers and on the increasing value of NLMís global information services.