Abeed Sarker PhD

Dr. Abeed Sarker joined the BMI faculty as an Assistant Professor from the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Sarker received his Ph.D. in Computing from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He completed his postdoctoral research in the BMI Department at Arizona State University, before joining the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include natural language processing, social media mining, applied machine learning, and biomedical informatics. In particular, he is interested in designing, developing, and deploying end-to-end data-centric systems that can convert noisy free-text data into valuable and actionable knowledge that can aid and empower researchers in the medical and public health domains. His recent research has focused on topics such as drug safety, non-medical drug use, mental health, health policy, evidence-based medicine, and health-related communication via social media.

He is the PI on an NIH R01 award, “Mining Social Media Big Data For Toxicovigilance: Automating The Monitoring Of Prescription Medication Abuse Via Natural Language Processing And Machine Learning Methods.” The goal of the grant is to develop methods that can effectively utilize the vast amounts of data about prescription medication abuse, including opioid abuse that is publicly available via social media to better understand and characterize the problem.

He has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications in journals, conferences, and workshops. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making and is an Editorial Board Member for Digital Health: Frontiers in Public Health.