Firas Wehbe completed his undergraduate (1997, Chemistry) and medical (2001, Doctor of Medicine) education at the American University of Beirut. He joined DBMI as a graduate student in July 2001. For his Masters work, he helped in the design and implementation of the KnowledgeMap (KM) application, an online curricular content management system for the medical school. The KnowledgeMap web-application utilizes novel NLP techniques developed by Joshua Denny and Jeffrey Smithers for identification of UMLS biomedical concepts in educational documents. His masters project (defended in August 2004) was supervised by Dr. Anderson Spickard-III. He utilized a mixed qualitative/quantitative research methodology to evaluate the pilot deployment of KM in the first year medical school anatomy course and its impact on instruction.

Currently, his PhD work is supervised by Dr. Constantin Aliferis. He is interested in building systems for the retrieval and organization of molecular medicine modalities and evidence. In the semantically rich domain of Clinical Bioinformatics, researchers and clinicians search for a multitude of object types that have complex interrelationships. He is combining traditional Information Retrieval methods with Ontology and Description Logic based methods that can represent the semantic richness of the domain, and facilitate indexing, storage, and knowledge base maintenance.

He is also working as a research assistant on the CCASAnet project with Dr. Dan Masys, developing web applications in support of analysis and meta-analysis of HIV-related epidemiological data.

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