Giles Robinson, Neuro-Oncology Division Director at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, shared on LinkedIn:
“Please join me in welcoming Dr. Michael Watkins who joins St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as Director of Computational Research – DISCOVER.
Dr. Watkins most recently led the data standards and modeling team within Data for the Common Good (D4CG) at the University of Chicago. D4CG develops shared data infrastructure for multi-institutional research programs in areas including:
- pediatric oncology,
- monogenic diabetes,
- monogenic epilepsy,
- and gun violence.
Its Pediatric Cancer Data Commons (PCDC) brings together harmonized clinical data from international pediatric cancer research consortia spanning 38 countries. Through this work, Dr. Watkins has contributed to oncology data standards and terminology efforts involving federal, research, and standards-development organizations, including ASTP/ONC, the National Cancer Institute, and HL7.
His research interests center on data interoperability and semantic engineering. A major focus is the relationship between clinical terminologies and the data models in which they are used, particularly the problems that arise when representations designed primarily for billing or administrative purposes are reused for clinical research and computational analysis. He is interested in how this kind of semantic debt affects data integrity and their use by AI-enabled systems.
His work investigates how graph-based approaches to knowledge management can connect structural data models with their underlying concept bindings and allow data to be more easily and reliably transformed across clinical, research, and regulatory representations.
Dr. Watkins also serves as a Co-Chair of the HL7 Clinical Genomics working group which leads the development of genomic data profiles for the HL7 FHIR standard. HL7 standards are used internationally for data exchange and are implemented by leading electronic health record vendors, such as Epic.”
Other articles about Giles Robinson on OncoDaily.