Dr. Ricky Taira obtained his Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1982, and went on to receive a PhD in biomedical physics in 1988 from UCLA. He is now a Professor in the Department of Radiological Sciences at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine Dr. Taira is part of the UCLA Medical Imaging Informatics Group, and is the lead scientist for the mi2 Group. His past research interests have included development of picture archive and communication systems (PACS), medical knowledge bases (the KMeD project), and currently, natural language processing (NLP) of medical corpora and formal ontological representations of disease entities. He is the co-PI and investigator of several NIH-funded grants. Dr. Taira teaches the Medical Knowledge Representation class that is part of the NLM training program in imaging-based medical informatics.