National Library of Medicine (NLM) grantee Dr. Cui Tao of the University of Texas is one of the 102 scientists and researchers named by President Obama on January 9, 2017 as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

Dr. Tao’s area of expertise is in clinical informatics and computer science, and her research interests include ontologies, standard terminologies, semantic web, information extraction and integration as well as applying ontology and semantic web technologies to clinical and translational studies. Dr. Tao was awarded her first research project (R01) grant from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health in 2014 to study “Patient Medical History Representation, Extraction, and Inference from EHR Data”. Dr. Tao received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

The awards, established by President Clinton in 1996, are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. Awardees are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach.

Dr. Tao is the sixth NLM grantee to receive this honor. Earlier NLM PECASE recipients are Dr. Russ Altman (Stanford University), Dr. Ida Sim (University of California, San Francisco), Dr. Kenneth Mandl (Harvard University), Dr. Bradley Malin (Vanderbilt University) and Dr. John Brownstein (Children’s Hospital Boston).