Background & Research Interests

I am an Associate Professor in Digital Health at the University of Melbourne's School of Computing & Information Systems. 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, please see here.

With colleagues at the University of Birmingham in the UK, we are currently recruiting for a PhD student to work on the automated analysis of clinical interviews. This is a joint PhD funding opportunity based at the University of Birmingham, but with at least 12 months spent at the University of Melbourne. More information and instructions are available here.

News

Dec 2025

• New publications with Annie Chen at the University of Washington on substance use stigma:
• Chen et al. (2025) Comparing the use experiences, contextual factors, and recovery strategies associated with different substances.  Substance Use & Misuse 
  
• Wang et al. (2025) Identifying stigma phenotypes in social media narratives of substance use disorder.  JMIR

Oct 2025

• PhD student graduate Dr Gracie (Yiyuan) Pu has successfully defended her PhD
  
• New PhD student Zihan Xu has joined us from the Health Informatics Division at Weill Cornell.

Jul 2025

• PhD student Liuliu Chen presented her paper What do you meme? – Identifying characteristics and user perceptions of suicide memes in social media  at ICWSM
• PhD student Jemima Kang published her paper Converging representations of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism have have converged on social media: linguistic and topic analysis of trends in Reddit data in JMIR
  
• Daniel Cabrera Lozoya and Gracie Pu have both submitted their PhD theses

Dec 2024

• Two papers at the 2024 ALTA workshop.  One with PhD student Daniel Cabrera on identifying reliable health condition self-disclosure statements on social media, and the other with data science masters student Jiahe (Grace) Liu on identifying stigmatizing content in lung cancer-related social media discourse. 
  

Sep 2024

• Co-organized the University of Melbourne and Hokkaido University Workshop on Advancing Digital Health & Medical AI with Prof Katsuhiko Ogasawara and colleagues at the University of Hokkaido in Sapporo with presentations from Prof Kas Thursky, Dr Abe Kasuhiro, Dr Hiroyuki Sugimori, Dr Daniel Capurro, Mr Soki Maeda, Dr Ren Togo, Dr Ayako Yagahara,  Mr Daniel Cabrera Lozoya, and Dr Vlada Rozova
• New publication:  A theory-informed deep learning approach to extracting and characterizing substance use-related stigma in social media.  Roesler, Johnny, Conway, Chen.  BMC Digital Health. 2, 1 (2024)
• New publication:  Generating mental health transcripts with SAPE (Spanish Adaptive Prompt Engineering).  Lozoya, Berazaluce, Perches, Lúa, Conway, D’Alfonso.  NAACL (2024)
• New publication:  The use of NLP methods in Reddit to investigate opioid use:  scoping review.  Almeida, Patton, Conway, Gupta, Strathdee, Borquez.  JMIR Infodemiology 4, e51156 (2024)
  

May 2024

• Welcome to new PhD students Liuliu Chen, Abir Naskar, and Jemima Kang
• Awarded grant to support joint University of Melbourne/Hokkaido University workshop on Digital Health & Medical AI
• New publication with masters student Damian Curran on Similarity ranking of case law using propositions as features at the 16th Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence International Symposia in Hamamatsu, Shizuouka (Japan).  Damian's work was ranked 2nd (out of 24) for Task 1 of the 2024 Competition on Legal Information and Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE-2024)
  

Dec 2023

• Co-organized and co-presented the 2023 Australasian Language Technology Association tutorial on Clinical Natural Language Processing with Dr Jinghui Liu and Dr Vlada Rozova.

Jul 2023

Two papers at MedInfo 2023 in Sydney, both with collaborators at the University of Utah's Division of Epidemiology:

• Development of a natural language processing system to identify clinical documentation of electronic cigarette use.  Alba, Gan, Hu, Zhu, Duvall, Conway.   Proceedings of MedInfo 2023: The 19th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics
  
• Automatic extraction of skin and soft tissue infection status from clinical notes. Rhoads, Christensen, Westerdahl, Stevens, Chapman, Conway. Proceedings of MedInfo 2023: The 19th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics

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