Carolyn McGregor

Dr. Carolyn McGregor is the Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics based at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada. She received her bachelor of applied science in computer science honours degree, and her PhD degree in computer science from the University of Technology, Sydney. Dr McGregor has led pioneering research in event stream processing, temporal data stream data mining, business process modelling and service oriented architectures. She now progresses this research within the context of health and medicine for advanced support for clinical management and research.

Through industry consultancy, Carolyn has provided strategic guidance, in the areas of Decision Support, Data Warehousing and Data Mining, to some of Australia's leading corporations such as St George Bank, Woolworths, Commonwealth Bank, The Mortgage Company (Westpac) and the NSW TAB. The Financial Controller of The Mortgage Company was quoted as saying that "Carolyn's single handed scoping, development, implementation and communication of Executive Information Systems, covering all technical and business aspects, is outstanding".

In 2001, she was the first Australian to be invited to complete a prestigious three month research internship with IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown, NY, usually only offered to American researchers.

In 2007, she was awarded a prestigious Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

Professor McGregor has a track record of leadership in Health Informatics across, research, teaching, university governance and service to the profession. She established, grew and led Health Informatics Research at the University of Western Sydney where her internationally recognised research was supported by over $AU1 million in grant funding from sources such as the Australian Research Council and the Telstra Broadband Fund. Since her arrival in Canada in 2007 she has led innovative Health Informatics Research that has been supported by almost $5 million in funding from research agencies in Canada and China and industry partners. This has enabled her to establish and grow Health Informatics Research at UOIT.

Professor McGregor is an international leading researcher in the area of critical care health informatics and in particular neonatal health informatics for which she has specialised for over 15 years. She has over 100 refereed publications, filed 3 patents and has established two startup companies.

In Canada, she has provided strategic consultative support to Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Services and Providence Care in the area of Patient Journey Modelling to support their transition to new electronic health records. She has extensive research collaborations with Neonatal Intensive Care Units and Intensive Care Units in Canada, China, USA, Australia and Ireland.

She is the Canadian representative for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) and was the inaugural IEEE EMBS representative for IEEE Women in Engineering. In 2008 she was awarded a multi-million dollar IBM First of a Kind Research (FOAK) Award. In 2009 she received the IBM Infosphere Innovation award for her UOIT based team's role in project Artemis. In 2010 she was awarded the UOIT Early Career Research Excellence Award. In 2011 she was one of four international innovators featured in the IBM Centennial "Wild Ducks" video, also now available on YouTube.

In 2012 an Artificial Intelligence in Medicine paper she co-authored with a former PhD student in 2007 was recognised as the 3rd most cited article in that journal in the six years since 2007.

In 2013 her Artemis research project was awarded the Ingenious Award in the Not for Profit category by the Information Technology Association of Canada.

In 2014 she was awarded membership in the Order of Australia for her significant service to science and innovation through health care information systems.

What if you could take years of data mining expertise in the financial services and retail industry and apply it to saving babies? That's exactly what Dr. Carolyn McGregor did when she left a career at one of Australia's top banks to lead the research and development of a new data analytics platform in the neonatal care department at the University of Western Sydney. Today, as Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics, Dr. McGregor's research is pioneering new ways for neonatal health experts to monitor and care for their patients. Collecting vast amounts of patient data including heart and respiratory rates, Dr. McGregor's approach to data management means 24-hour monitoring capabilities that can capture even the slightest abnormalities. From a young age, Dr. McGregor's fascination with numbers and eventual pursuit of a computer science degree, led her to recognize the secret to managing 'Big Data' was building the right infrastructure. The system Dr. McGregor and her research team developed produces over 1,200 points of data per second. Multiply that with a growing database of patients, and it's easy to see the incredible volume and wealth of insight now readily available. In addition to providing real-time monitoring tools, Dr. McGregor's research is also changing the way doctors are educated. With an expanding database of patients with varying conditions, Dr. McGregor's research makes it possible for doctors to dive deeply into specific aliments and make connection to insights that were previously unavailable. In addition to the impact Dr. McGregor's research is having on the health care of premature babies, other intensive care departments are recognizing the profound impact data management can have, particularly where real-time, continuous monitoring is critical to patient care. Internationally recognized as a thought leader in data management, Dr. McGregor's expertise is being sought beyond the medical community. She was approached by the Canadian Space Agency to apply her learning to monitoring the heart rates of astronauts participating in the planned mission to Mars.