Laura has had a variety of careers in a number of different settings. She received her undergraduate degree in sociology at Northwestern University where she was introduced to computerized data analysis. After graduation, she continued her work in social science research at the Institute for Social Research and the School of Education at The University of Michigan. Later, she continued her graduate education at Michigan and completed her Masters Degree in Social Work. She worked in a variety of social service agencies for almost 20 years until she found her former interest in computers piqued again. She returned to school and completed the computer technology program at Southern Maine Technical College, now Southern Maine Community College. After graduating from SMTC, she did database administration and programming at IBM in Vermont . She moved to Portland , Oregon , in 2002 and began her work at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) doing clinical trial coordination for the OHSU Cancer Institute. Since transferring to the Informatics Shared Resource in 2005, Laura has been responsible for maintaining the OHSU Cancer Institute's clinical trials management system (CTMS), creating reports from the CTMS, training new users and providing technical support. She has also done web site development and maintenance for the OHSU Cancer Institute.
In addition, since 2005, Laura has been involved with the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Biomedical Information Grid™ (caBIG™) initiative as the OHSU representative to the Data Sharing and Intellectual Capital (DSIC) Working Group and the DSIC Working Group's two special interest groups (SIGs): the Regulatory SIG which is focused on legal, regulatory and policy issues relating to human subjects research protections and the Proprietary SIG which is concerned with intellectual property matters that affect both the distribution of open source software and data sharing. She has also participated in the adoption of the caBIG™ Clinical Trials Management Systems (CTMS) Working Group's Cancer Central Clinical Database (C3D) tool at the OHSU Cancer Institute.
Currently, Laura is working on a research project for the DSIC working group to monitor and document the adoption of two caBIG™ tools at OHSU: caTissue CORE which is caBIG's tissue bank repository tool for biospecimen inventory, tracking, and basic annotation and the cancer Text Information Extraction System (caTIES) which is a locator to tissue resources via the extraction of coded information from free text surgical pathology reports using controlled terminologies to populate caBIG™-compliant data structures. This research will document the IRB review process as well as the development of any model IRB protocols or data sharing agreements that will be created during the adoption of these tools.
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