Cui Tao, Ph.D.

Dr. Cui Tao received a Ph.D. and a M.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. She also earned a B.S. degree from Beijing Normal University, where she majored in Biology and minored in Computer Science. In 2009, Dr. Tao joined Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics. Her research focuses on ontology generation, conceptual modeling, and information extraction over the biomedical domain. She is also interested in the Semantic Web and its application on biomedical and clinical data.

Dr. Tao is one of the key members of the Lexical Grid (or LexGrid) project. This project is Mayo's contribution to the emerging area of standard storage of controlled terminologies and ontologies. In particular, she is leading the LexRDF project, where she leverages Semantic Web technologies to design, implement, and prototype powerful functionality (e.g., inferencing, editing) to the ISO (International Standards Organization) standard for terminology services based upon the LexGrid model.

Dr. Tao serves as a subject matter expert in NCI (National Cancer Institute)'s caBIG Vocabulary Knowledge Center, a reviewer for multiple caBIG projects, and the administrator for the caBIG compatibility review system. She is an active member of the caBIG Vocabulary Common Data Element workspace (VCDE), Document and Training workspace and Wiki working groups. In addition, she is involved with various organizations, including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the National Center of Biomedical Ontology (NCBO). She is also a member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). She has been a reviewer and program committee member for numerous journals, conferences and symposiums, and has served as an Authors Advisory Board member of the Journal of Biochemical Technology.