Kirk Roberts, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics. He has previously conducted research in natural language processing (NLP) in academia, government, and industry. His research work includes using NLP to both extract structured information from unstructured free text and create interactive natural language applications, such as question answering systems and search engines. He actively performs research in clinical information extraction, spatial information extraction, question answering, and information retrieval. His research draws inspiration from fields as diverse as medicine, linguistics, data science, and machine learning.