Amy Olex

Amy Olex, Ph.D, is the Senior Research Scientist at VCU’s Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research and the Informatics Team Lead for the National COVID Cohort Collaborative’s ImmunoSuppressed/Compromised Domain Team. She obtained a BS in Computer Science from VCU in 2005, an MS in Computer Science with a Certificate in Structural and Computational Biology from Wake Forest University in 2007, and a PhD in Computer Science at VCU in 2022.

Her dissertation work was in the area of Clinical Natural Language Processing and focused on temporal reasoning from unstructured texts and medical timeline extraction. She aims to continue this line of research and apply it to the area of Multiple Sclerosis research by extracting and analyzing MS symptom progression timelines from both structured and unstructured EHR data. She is also passionate about transforming research into usable tools, including making NLP algorithms and tools accessible to non-technical researchers, and participating in interdisciplinary team science. Outside of work, she loves spending time with my family, walking the dog, gardening, and sewing/crafts.