He co-directs the Discovery Systems Laboratory and the Biomedical Language Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt. He is also the 2012 Chair-Elect of AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) NLP (Natural Language Processing) working group. Dr. Xu received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University, focusing on research areas relevant to biomedicallanguage processing. His primary research interests include NLP of clinical text, text mining of biomedical literature, and healthcare data mining. He is the author of many publications on biomedical NLP and text mining, and his research on medication extraction received the Homer Warner Award from AMIA in 2009. Dr. Xu has been involved in many NIH funded projects, and has been principal investigator on a few grants, including R01s from National Library of Medicine (NLM) and National Cancer Institute (NCI). ​ Posted on