PNNL

Two PNNL data scientists, Lauren Charles and Courtney Corley, were authors for one of the top 10 percent most cited PLOS ONE papers published in 2015. Charles worked as lead author on the paper. PLOS ONE is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science.

The paper, “Using Social Media for Actional Disease Surveillance and Outbreak Management: A Systematic Literature Review,” was cited 54 times as of September 19, 2019. The research looked to answer two specific questions, “Can social media be integrated into disease surveillance practice and outbreak management to support and improve public health?” and “Can social media be used to effectively target populations, specifically vulnerable populations, to test an intervention and interact with a community to improve health outcomes?”

Charles and Corley are both data scientists in the Data Science and Analytics group at PNNL. Charles is a veterinarian trained in public health, epidemiology, zoonotic diseases as well as mathematics, biology, environmental and geographic information science, plant pathology, and bioinformatics. Corley is a nationally recognized leader in the field of data science and biosurveillance through his work in social media analytics, computational epidemiology, and natural language processing.

The paper was written by 11 authors from organizations around the world.