Aline Talhouk

Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC

I am an assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. I am also a principal investigator at OVCARE, BC gynecological cancer research team, where I direct a data science and informatics laboratory.

My research program proposes to bring individualized care to ovarian and endometrial cancer patients by using genetic characteristics of the cancer, as well as other data and risk factors. I am also interested in building predictive models to help women who are approaching menopause better discern the signs and symptoms of gynecological malignancy to improve early detection and identify opportunities for prevention.

Another area of interest is privacy in data sharing and the ethical use of innovative tools in digital health and informatics, including mobile health and modelling data from wearables. I am involved in several collaborations around building infrastructure for data sharing that use privacy-preserving artificial intelligence and machine learning to derive predictive analytics that empower patients, without compromising their privacy.

I completed my PhD in Statistics from the Department of Statistics at UBC in 2013, focusing on computational statistics and machine learning. During my graduate studies, I was fortunate to work under the supervision of Drs Kevin Murphy, Arnaud Doucet and Paul Gustafson. During this time, I was the recipient of a doctoral NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship.

I presently hold a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar award, a CIHR project grant, as well as the UBC Faculty of Medicine New Faculty Researcher Award.