Nigel is a Principal Research Associate in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (DTAL) at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). Nigel’s research is in the broad area of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. His research brings together computational techniques such as machine learning, syntactic parsing and concept understanding with the aim of providing a machine-understandable semantic representation of unstructured text for supporting biomedical discovery and knowledge integration. He is currently funded by a 5-year EPSRC fellowship grant to investigate the Semantic Interpretation of Personal Health messages on the Web (SIPHS) project. This is an international collaborative effort to leverage social media data for digital disease applications such as detecting infectious disease outbreaks and adverse drug reaction. Nigel is also applying text/data mining to the discovery of phenotypes in biomedical literature in a continuation of the Marie Curie PhenoMiner project (http://boreas.mml.cam.ac.uk/phenominer/). Additionally he has interests in harnessing technology for digital disease surveillance and has worked for six years on the JST-funded BioCaster project where he served as technology consultant on the international Global Health Security Action Group technical working group on Risk Management and Communication.