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

• New publication: Perspectives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Reddit: Comparative natural language processing study of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Hu, Conway. JMIR Infodemiology. 2, 2 (2022)
• New publication: Consumer-generated discourse on cannabis as a medicine: Scoping review of techniques. Khademi Habibabadi, Hallinan, Bonomo, Conway.  Journal of Medical Internet Research. 24, 11 (2022)
• New publication: Social media discourse and internet search queries on cannabis as a medicine: A systematic review.  Khademi Habibabadi, Bonomo, Conway, Hallinan. MedRxiv (2022)
• New grant with Dr Jude Mikal at the University of Minnesota School of Public health:  Leveraging Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning tools to identify prodromal cognitive impairment in longitudinal social media data [University of Minnesota Informatics Institute Large Seed Grant]
  

July 2022

• Co-organized the 2022 Emerging Researchers in Health Informatics Symposium (ERHIC) at Macquarie University with Brian Chapman, David Lyell, and Sidong Liu.  This was the first iteration in what we hope will be an annual event bringing early career Australian health informatics/digital health researchers together.

May 2022

• New publication:  Substance use-related stigma:  an exploratory study of search behavior using Google Trends (2004-2021).  Conway, Citrenbaum, Chen.  American Journal of Drug & Alcohol Abuse (2022)  [An extended preprint and data associated with this work are available here]
• New publication:  Examining stigma relating to substance use and contextual factors in social media discussions.  Chen, Johnny, Conway. Drug & Alcohol Dependence Reports (2022)

Mar 2022

• New publication:  Pain points in parents' interactions with newborn screening systems:  a qualitative study.  Conway, Vuong, Hart, Rorhwasser, Eilbeck.  BMC Pediatrics. 22, 167 (2022)

Jan 2022

• Details regarding the 2022 Applied Health NLP Journal Club can be found here
• New publication:  Examining cannabis, tobacco, and vaping discourse on Reddit:  an exploratory approach using natural language processing.  Benson, Hu, Chen, Zhu, Conway.  Frontiers in Public Health