Dr Frank Lin

Dr Frank Lin is a medical oncologist and a biomedical informatician at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. He completed his undergraduate medical training in New Zealand in 2003 (University of Otago). After his internship year, he undertook doctoral studies in biomedical informatics at the University of New South Wales, using informatics to study virulence factors of clinically relevant bacterial pathogens. He then commenced physician training in both New Zealand (Waikato Hospital) and Australia (St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney), specialising in medical oncology.

The broad theme of his research is in the study of computational strategies to address complex information needs faced by oncologists, patients, and researchers alike. He is particularly interested in translating clinical and genomic data to deliver precision care in the oncology clinics. Some of his works, in the areas of machine learning-based decision support, electronic medical record (EMR) analysis, and clinical text mining, have been recognised previously.

He has developed several open-source software projects for EMR-based clinical research, including a text mining pipeline for knowledge discovery from the EMR and a specialised ontology for profiling treatment outcomes of cancer patients from EMR. He is an editorial board member of JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics.

He also maintains an open-source decision-support tool for guiding evidence-based recommendations of treatment and clinical trials based on cancer molecular biomarkers.