Rate My Professor Amber Stubbs

Amber Stubbs is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Department of Computer, Data, and Mathematical Sciences at Simmons University, where she also serves as Undergraduate Computer Science & Informatics Program Director. She earned a B.S. in Computer Science and English from Simmons University in 2005, an M.A. in Computer Science from Brandeis University in 2008, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brandeis University in 2013. Her doctoral dissertation, 'A Methodology for Using Professional Knowledge in Corpus Annotation,' was advised by James Pustejovsky. Before her current positions, Stubbs was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Information Studies at the State University of New York at Albany from 2012 to 2014, where she contributed to the 2014 i2b2 Natural Language Processing Shared Task on de-identification of longitudinal clinical narratives and heart disease risk factors. She also served as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University from 2013 to 2014. Joining Simmons full-time as an Assistant Professor in 2014, initially in the School of Library and Information Science until 2018 and then in the Department of Computer, Data, and Mathematical Sciences, she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020 and became Department Chair in 2021.

Stubbs's research focuses on natural language processing, particularly annotation methodologies and corpus creation for machine learning applications in the bioclinical domain. She co-authored the book Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning (O'Reilly Media, 2012) with James Pustejovsky and developed lightweight annotation tools MAE and MAI. Her work has advanced clinical natural language processing through participation in shared tasks, including overviews of the 2014 i2b2/UTHealth challenges on de-identification and heart disease risk factors (Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2015), cohort selection for clinical trials (n2c2 2018 Track 1, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2019), and adverse drug events extraction (n2c2 2018, JAMIA, 2020). These publications have garnered significant citations. Stubbs has secured funding through CRA-W Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates grants (2015, 2016, 2018, 2019), the Simmons School of Library and Information Science Dole Award (2016-2017), and serves as Principal Investigator on a collaborative NSF Linguistics Grant proposal. She has held leadership roles on university committees, such as Chair of Computer Science faculty search committees (2019-2020, 2023-2024), the COCIS Ad-hoc Technology Committee (2018-2019, 2020-present), and guest editor for special issues in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Additionally, she has presented public lectures, including 'PC, MD? Can computers learn to diagnose medical problems?' in the Simmons Lunchtime Lecture Series.