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Dr Michael Lawley

Research Group Leader

https://people.csiro.au/L/M/Michael-Lawley

Contact details:

LEVEL 7, 296 HERSTON RD
HERSTON 4029 QLD AUSTRALIA

Biography

Dr Michael Lawley is Research Manager and Group Leader with the CSIRO Australian e-Health Research Centre, part of the Health & Biosecurity Business Unit. Michael leads the Health Informatics Group with teams working Clinical Terminology, Genomics Informatics, Medical Text NLP and Search, and Health Data Interoperability.

He has deep expertise in Clinical Terminology and specifically large scale ontologies such as SNOMED CT. Technology developed my Michael and his team has been licensed nationally and internationally by standards bodies, government organisations and SMEs. In 2018 Michael received the Award for Excellence from SNOMED International for his many contributions to and impact on SNOMED CT.

His group’s Clinical Terminology work has a specific focus on SNOMED CT. This research has resulted in novel applications to deal with the issues of accessing and analysing patient data from multiple data sources. Most notable among these are Ontoserver and Snapper. These are being deployed by the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) as the terminology server and authoring tools for the National Clinical Terminology Service (NCTS). Ontoserver is licensed nationally and internationally and is broadly considered to be the best and most advanced implementation of HL7's FHIR Terminology Services specification.

Additionally, Michael developed Snorocket, a Description Logic classifier, that was licensed by SNOMED International (then, the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation - IHTSDO) for use in maintaining SNOMED CT, and led the development of the Snapper technology for mapping existing terminologies to SNOMED CT. He was involved in a review of the restructuring of the Australian Medicines Terminology, is active in several IHTSDO working groups, and is a member of the Australian Clinical Terminology User Group (ACT-UG).

Michael’s previous roles include two years as Senior Research Fellow with the Faculty of Information Technology at Queensland University of Technology, and twelve years at the Cooperative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC Pty Ltd), where he led the Pegamento Project’s work exploring model-driven development techniques and prototyping languages and tools to support model-driven development. He has extensive expertise in software architecture and distributed systems and was a core contributor to the DSTC’s work on the Object Management Group (OMG) Meta Object Facility 2.0 Query/View/Transformation (MOF QVT).

Current Roles

  • Research Group Leader
    Health Informatics

Academic Qualifications

  • 2000

    PhD
    Griffith University

  • 1988

    Bachelor of Science (Hons)
    The University of Melbourne

Professional Experiences

  • 2014-present

    Research Group Leader
    CSIRO

  • 2014-present

    Adjunct Professor
    Griffith University

  • 2008-2014

    Principal Research Scientist
    CSIRO

Achievements and Awards

  • 2018-2018

    Award for Excellence
    SNOMED International

Community and Corporate Citizenship

  • 2015-present

    Elected Member, IHTSDO Modelling Advisory Group

  • 2011-2015

    Elected Member, IHTSDO Technical Committee