Background & Research Interests

I am a Senior Lecturer in Digital Health at the University of Melbourne's School of Computing & Information Systems and the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health.  My research interests are centred on the application of computational methods — particularly natural language processing — to public health research questions, with much of my research output focused on the broad areas of communicable diseases, mental health, and substance use.  In addition to my computational work, I also publish on ethical and socio-technical issues associated with the development of digital health technologies.

My research has been funded by the United States National Institutes of Health (National Library of Medicine and National Institute on Drug Abuse).

Prior to joining the University of Melbourne in 2021, I held research positions at the University of Pittsburgh, Mayo Clinic, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Utah.

Potential PhD Students

I am always interested in supervising PhD projects at the intersection of digital health and computer science.  If you have a strong interest in applying your computational or qualitative analysis skills to address public health research questions, first take time to check out my publications and then please email me at mike.conway@unimelb.edu.au using the subject "PhD Enquiry" with a brief statement of your research interests and a CV. Individuals with training or interest in social science/computational social science are particularly encouraged to get in touch.

***Update*** I am currently interested in recruiting strong PhD students to work on projects related to (a) pharmacovigilance of cannabis-related products in social media text, and (b) the use of NLP methods to investigate substance use disorder-related stigma processes in social media data.  For the latter project I am also seeking a postdoctoral fellow (see job description) interested in working with both computational and qualitative methods [Note that this postdoctoral fellow would be based at the University of Washington in Seattle, not the University of Melbourne].

***New Update***  In collaboration with the University of Melbourne's Department of General Practice, we are currently recruiting a PhD student to work on using NLP to automatically extract risk-taking behaviours (e.g. substance use, risky sexual behaviors) from clinical notes (see job description)

News

Jan 2023

  • New grant with Dr Annie Chen at the University of Washington:  Using narratives to identify stigma phenotypes - a socio-ecological approach [National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse - R21DA056684]

Dec 2022

July 2022

May 2022

Mar 2022

Jan 2022


Mike Conway

Mike Conway
            photograph  

mike.conway@unimelb.edu.au

Senior Lecturer in Digital Health
School of Computing & Information Systems
University of Melbourne
700 Swanston Street
Carlton VIC 3053
Australia