Meliha Yetisgen-Yildiz is joining the BHI core faculty as an Assistant Professor starting December 1st.  She received her BS degree in Computer Engineering and Information Science from Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey) and MS degree on Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey).  She received her PhD from the University of Washington with a thesis on Biomedical Informatics in December 2007.  After working as a post-doctoral researcher at UW, she joined Kiha, Inc. as a text mining researcher.  Her current research interests include biomedical text mining and information extraction.  She will be focused on a project working with Peter Tarczy-Hornoch and other leadership of the Northwest Institute for Genetic Medicine (http://www.nwigm.org/) using Natural Language Processing approaches to extract phenotype from the electronic medical record for research purposes (funded by the NWIGM LSDF award).