Annie T. Chen

atchen@uw.edu

I am an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine, where I lead the Language, Behavior, and Context lab. I am also an affiliate of the eScience Institute and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and hold adjunct faculty appointments in the UW Information School and UW Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, where I am co-director of the Svoboda Diaries Project, a lab that engages 15-20 students per year in research and/or historical preservation activities.

I received a BA in Psychology from Harvard University and MSIS and PhD degrees in Information Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My work sits at the conceptual intersection of modeling/studying psychosocial and communicative processes in different life contexts to develop strategies for improving everyday life.

Here are conceptual and methodological foci of my work:

Conceptual interests:

Patient experience in the management of chronic and complex conditions
The relationship between information behavior, conceptualization of health and wellbeing, and impacts on health-related behaviors
Psychosocial and communicative processes in online and offline environments

Methodological interests:

Interpretive research methodologies
Data and visual representation to support interpretive research approaches
Research infrastructures to support the analysis of psychosocial and communicative phenomena

I am currently Chair of the Special Interest Group, Information Needs, Seeking and Use (SIG USE). Please check out our website if you are interested in learning more and getting involved.

Research

Broadly speaking, I am interested in how to represent and interpret psychosocial and communicative processes as they occur in society and in the world, for the purposes of wellbeing.

My interests manifest in various conceptual areas including:

Methodological innovation in the representation of complex psychosocial and communicative processes
Research infrastructures for interpretation
Social media research
Understanding consumer behavior through online methods
Patient and/or caregiver experience of specific conditions/disorders/contexts (fibromyalgia, substance use, dementia, mental health)
Digital humanities

Current projects include:

VOCALE LBD+: Leveraging Social Technologies and Problem-Solving Skills to Enhance Mastery among Caregivers of Persons with Lewy Body Dementia https://www.emorycaregiving.org/current-funded-pilot-projects/
Using Narratives to Identify Stigma Phenotypes - A Socio-Ecological Approach 1R21DA056684-01
Svoboda Diaries Project

Sample publications:

Chen, A. T., Johnny, S., Conway, M. (2022). Examining stigma relating to substance use and contextual factors in social media discussions. Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports, 3: 100061. DOI: 10.1016/j.dadr.2022.100061
Fields, S., Cole, C. L., Oei, C., Chen, A. T. (2023). Using named entity recognition and network analysis to distinguish personal networks from the social milieu in nineteenth century Ottoman-Iraqi personal diaries. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38(1), 66-86. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqac047
Zaslavsky, O., Kaneshiro, J., Chu, F., Teng, A., Domoto-Reilly, K., Chen A. T. (2022). Virtual intervention for caregivers of persons with Lewy Body Dementia: Pilot quasi-experimental single-arm study. JMIR Formative Research, 6(7):e37108. DOI: 10.2196/37108.
Chen, A. T., Huey, J., Coe, S., Kaganovsky, J., Malouf, E. A., Evans, H. D., Daker, J., Harper, E., Fordiani, O., Lowe, E. E., Oldroyd, C., Price, A., Roth, K., Stoddard, J., Crandell, J. N., Shirts, B. H. (2023). Extending cascade screening using genealogy, direct-to-consumer ancestry genetics, and social media – the ConnectMyVariant exploratory pilot study. JMIR Cancer, 9:e43126. DOI: 10.2196/43126
Chen, A. T., Komi, M., Bessler, S., Mikles, S. P., Zhang, Y. (accepted). Integrating statistical and visual analytic methods for bot identification of health-related survey data. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbi.2023.104439

News

I was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award in Biomedical and Health Informatics in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (2022-2023)

Upcoming presentations:

Chaliparambil, R. K., Johnny, S., Wong, S. H., Glass, J. E., Wang, L., Conway, M., Chen, A. T. (accepted). A theory-informed approach to studying social media about substance use. To be presented at the annual meeting of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), Nov.11-15th, 2023, New Orleans, LA.
Chen, A. T., Johnny, S., Chaliparambil, R., Wong, S., Glass, J. (accepted). Considering the role of information and context in promoting health-related behavioral change. To be presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), Oct. 27-31, London, UK.
Ma, R., Chen, A. T., Poole, A., Chassanoff, A., Wingate, A. Invited to give a panel presentation entitled, “Evaluating the value of exploratory tools in digital humanities collections and scholarly projects: Discussions from researchers, developers, and users’ perspectives,” at the annual meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T 2023), Oct. 26-31, 2023. London, United Kingdom.

I am co-organizing the following upcoming workshops:

Visual Analytics in Healthcare, co-located with IEEE VIS in Melbourne, Australia (late October 2023)
Exploring Collaborative Interpretive Practice, co-located with ASIS&T 2023 in London, UK (late October 2023)

Teaching

I teach courses on topics relating to consumer health informatics, user-centered and stakeholder-engaged design, and research methods. Though the courses I teach span a variety of modalities (in-person and virtual, synchronous and asynchronous), they include common threads:

Hands-on, real-world experience. My courses will involve projects that mentored by sponsors in different contexts, including clinical care, informatics, assisting living and retirement communities, software companies, academic laboratories, and more.
Discursive design. You bring the value! You and your colleagues benefit due to the contributions that each person makes. This may involve online discussion, in-class discussion, student presentations, and interactive group activities.
Teamwork. Courses afford opportunities for students to engage in collaborative work with others. These experiences can not only lead to valuable experiences for working on larger projects, but also perhaps catalyze lasting relationships with future collaborators!
Agency. Through participation, students have the ability to shape the content towards their interests. Take one to find out how this works.

Courses currently taught at the University of Washington:

BIME 543, Consumer Health and Informatics
BIME 554, Biomedical Information Interactions and Design
NMETH 530, Scholarly Proposal Development