Rashmie Abeysinghe

Dr. Abeysinghe received his doctorate degree in computer science from the University of Kentucky under the direction of Dr. Licong Cui. He is a Research Professor in the Department of Neurology at UTHealth Houston, and a member of Dr. Zhang’s neuroinformatics group in the Texas Institutite for Restorative Neurotechnologies. He has expertise in biomedical informatics spans from biomedical ontologies, controlled vocabularies, and metadata standards to deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and data mining. Specifically, he developed numerous quality assurance and alignment tools that are applicable to a wide variety of prominent biomedical ontologies, including SNOMED CT, the NCI thesaurus, and the Gene Ontology. These tools utilized techniques spanning from rule-based approaches to deep learning approaches and Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches leveraging structural and lexical properties of the ontologies. He also has a strong foundation in natural language processing, both rule-based and deep-learning-based, particularly for text mining purposes. Furthermore, he has a solid background in web development, specifically with Ruby on Rails for developing applications containing ontology visualization capabilities. For ReCARDO, he will work closely with Dr. Cui, Zhang, and participate in WS1 on CDE development and metadata and data standards and establishing an ontological foundation for AD/ADRD NIA-funded cohort data by leveraging existing biomedical ontologies.
He has comprehensive knowledge in ontology quality assurance, biomedical information extraction, and programming languages