Melanie Courtot

Mélanie Courtot is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on improving vaccine adverse events reporting with the goal of classifying them automatically. She aims to increase availability and integration of data pertaining to life sciences on the web, allowing for complex queries to be answered and for information to be computationally processed. Unambiguous denotation of data elements will improve reusability of experimental or clinical results and ultimately increase knowledge availability and integration.

Courtot has actively contributed to several biomedical ontologies, including the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO), the Vaccine Ontology (VO) and the Influenza Ontology. She developed the Minimum Information to Reference an External Ontology Term (MIREOT), increasing their interoperability. She co-founded and organized the Semantic Web Meetup group in Vancouver, which currently counts more than 140 members.

Courtot is an elected steering committee member of the OWL Experiences and Directions (OWLED) workshop series since 2008, and chaired the OWLED 2011 workshop. She co-organized the International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies in 2012, and is actively involved in the Open Biomedical and Biological Ontology Foundry organization.