Dr. Lynette Hirschman is Director for Biomedical Informatics in the Information Technology Center at the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, MA. She received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 1972 in Formal Linguistics and held positions at the New York University Linguistic String Project, Unisys Defense Systems, and the MIT Spoken Language Systems group before joining MITRE in 1993. Dr. Hirschman’s research has focused on human language understanding, information extraction and biomedical informatics. Since joining MITRE, her work has included development of the MiTAP system for mining newswire for disease outbreak surveillance, text mining for metadata capture for metagenomics, and her current research on secondary use of clinical data linked to translational medical applications. This research has led to the open source release of the MITRE Identification Scrubber Toolkit (MIST) for automated de-identification of unstructured clinical narrative. Dr. Hirschman has been a leader in the area of evaluation of natural language processing systems in the biomedical area. She was involved as participant and organizer of the early Message Understanding Conference (MUC) evaluations. She is a founding organizer of BioCreative (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction for Biology), the first international challenge evaluation of text mining for the biomedical domain and is also a co-organizer for the recent i2b2 NLP Challenge Evaluations.