Chief Data Scientist
Chief Data Scientist

Biography

Lauren Charles, Chief Data Scientist of AI-Driven One Health Security, joined PNNL in 2015 as a post doc. She is a Veterinarian (DVM) with a multidisciplinary Data Scientist PhD background. Combined with her bachelor’s training in Mathematics, Biology, and minor in Environmental Science along with her Master’s in Plant Pathology and BioInformatics, she thrives at identifying connections between living things and the environments they share through quantifiable data to promote health security, situational awareness, and understanding of infectious disease processes. Her past research has focused on wildlife population health, epidemiology, and ecology and the interface between wildlife, humans, domestic and agricultural animals along with the environments they share. Dr. Charles' current research focus on One Health Security through integrating heterogeneous data sources (such as medical data with social and news media, natural disasters, meteorological and climatic data, animal health, and sociocultural factors) into complex models and turning the research into actionable tools.  Lauren also holds a joint appointment with the WSU Paul Allen School for Global Health which focuses on One health research in Eastern Africa and Central and South America.  The AI-Driven One Health Security Program develops actionable tools using the TREADS (Threat risk & event analysis, detection, and surveillance) Framework to protect national and global threats, such as MedINT, One Health-TREADS, and National Wildlife Disease Database (NWDD) System.

Research Interests

  • One Health Security
  • Early Warning Systems
  • Decision Support Tools

Education

  • Doctor of Veterinary Medicine in Veterinary Medicine, North Carolina State University
  • Doctor of Philosophy in Fisheries & Wildlife Mgmt, North Carolina State University
  • Master of Science in Plant Pathology, North Carolina State University
  • Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics, Boston College

Affiliations and Professional Service

  • Joint Appointment, Research Professor, Washington State University (WSU) College of Veterinary Medicine, Paul Allen School for Global Animal Health
  • WSU Community Health Analytics Initiative
  • National Association of County and City Health Officials
  • International Society for Disease Surveillance
  • American Veterinary Medical Association

Publications

2025

  • Keshavamurthy, R., K. Pazdernik, C. Ham, S. Dixon, S. Erwin, and L. Charles. 2025. Meeting Global Health Needs via Infectious Disease Forecasting: Development of a Reliable Data-Driven Framework. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance 11, e59971-e59971. doi:10.2196/59971

2023

  • Keshavamurthy, R. and L. Charles. 2023. Predicting Kyasanur forest disease in resource-limited settings using event-based surveillance and transfer learning. Scientific Reports 13(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-023-38074-0

2022

  • Keshavamurthy, R., S. Dixon, K. Pazdernik, and L. Charles. 2022. Predicting infectious disease for biopreparedness and response: A systematic review of machine learning and deep learning approaches. One Health 15, 100439. doi:10.1016/j.onehlt.2022.100439
  • Dixon, S., R. Keshavamurthy, D. Farber, A. Stevens, K. Pazdernik, and L. Charles. 2022. A Comparison of Infectious Disease Forecasting Methods across Locations, Diseases, and Time. Pathogens 11(2), 185. doi:10.3390/pathogens11020185

2021

  • Moran, A., S. Hampton, S. Dowson, J. Dagdelen, A. Trewartha, G. Ceder, K. Persson, E. Saxon, A. Barker, L. Charles, and B. Webb-Robertson. 2021. Online Interactive Platform for COVID-19 Literature Visual Analytics: Platform Development Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research 23(7), e26995. doi:10.2196/26995
  • Keshavamurthy, R., S. Thumbi, and L. Charles. 2021. Digital Biosurveillance for Zoonotic Disease Detection in Kenya. Pathogens 10(7), 783. doi:10.3390/pathogens10070783
  • Charles, L. and C. Corley. 2021. Disease and Social Media in Post-Natural Disaster Recovery Philippines. doi:10.1101/2021.03.22.21254137
  • Moran, A., S. Hampton, S. Dowson, J. Dagdelen, A. Trewartha, G. Ceder, K. Persson, E. Saxon, A. Barker, L. Charles, and B. Webb-Robertson. 2021. Online Platform for Visual COVID-19 Literature Interactive Discovery. Journal of Medical Internet Research. doi:10.2196/preprints.26995

2020

  • Joslyn, C., L. Charles, C. DePerno, N. Gould, K. Nowak, B. Praggastis, E. Purvine, M. Robinson, J. Strules, and P. Whitney. 2020. A Sheaf Theoretical Approach to Uncertainty Quantification of Heterogeneous Geolocation Information. Sensors 20(12), 3418. doi:10.3390/s20123418

2019

  • Madandola, O., A. Tumurbaatar, L. Tan, S. Abbu, and L. Charles. 2019. Camera-based, mobile disease surveillance using Convolutional Neural Networks. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 11(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v11i1.9849
  • Gale, B., L. Charles, H. Mansoor, and C. YU. 2019. PocketAID: The Pocket Atlas of Infectious Diseases Mobile Application. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 11(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v11i1.9686
  • 2019. Multiple Document Representations from News Alerts for Automated Bio-surveillance Event Detection.
  • 2019. Multiple document representations from news alerts for automated bio-surveillance event detection. arXiv. doi:10.48550/arxiv.1902.06231

2018

  • 2018. Before the Battlefield: Competition Spurs Warfighter Innovations. JSTO in the News.
  • Tomaszewski, N., M. Agnihotri, H. Cheng, A. Bhadke, M. Henry, and L. Charles. 2018. Epi Evident: Biosurveillance to Monitor, Compare, and Forecast Disease Case Counts. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 10(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v10i1.8324
  • Chen, Q. and L. Charles. 2018. Machine Learning for Identifying Relevance to Biosurveillance in Multilingual Text. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 10(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v10i1.8375
  • Baker, H., A. Grady, C. Schwantes, E. Iarocci, R. Campbell, G. Calapristi, S. Dowson, M. Hart, L. Charles, and T. Quitugua. 2018. NBIC Biofeeds: Deploying a New, Digital Tool for Open Source Biosurveillance across Federal Agencies. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 10(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v10i1.8947
  • Charles, L., D. Wright, Z. Huang, C. White, F. Anubhav, Y. Jin, and M. Henry. 2018. Wearable Sensor Application for Integrated Early Warning and Health Surveillance. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 10(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v10i1.8552
  • 2018. Multiple Document Representations from News Alerts for Automated Bio-surveillance Event Detection.
  • Huang, Z., D. Wright, M. Henry, and L. Charles. 2018. Sensalert: A real-time group and individual health tracking application. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 1-6. doi:10.1145/3170427.3188675
  • Charles, L., W. Smith, J. Rounds, and J. Mendoza. 2018. Text-based analytics for biosurveillance. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, 117-131. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-77911-9_7

2017

  • Pavalanathan, U., V. Datla, S. Volkova, L. Charles-Smith, M. Pirrung, J. Harrison, A. Chappell, and C. Corley. 2017. Studying Military Community Health, Well-Being, and Discourse Through the Social Media Lens. Lecture Notes in Social Networks, 87-105. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-68604-2_6
  • Volkova, S., L. Charles, J. Harrison, and C. Corley. 2017. Uncovering the relationships between military community health and affects expressed in social media. EPJ Data Science 6(1). doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-017-0102-z
  • Morales, R., L. Charles-Smith, and B. Daniel. 2017. Control and Cost-benefit Analysis of Fast Spreading Diseases: The case of Ebola. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 9(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7584
  • Henry, M., L. Charles-Smith, K. Han, and C. Corley. 2017. Novel Analysis and Visualization of Chemical Events for Public Health Surveillance. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 9(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7644
  • Rounds, J., L. Charles-Smith, and C. Corley. 2017. Soda Pop: A Time-Series Clustering, Alarming and Disease Forecasting Application. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 9(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7582
  • Baker, H., C. Lesniak, E. Iarocci, G. Calapristi, M. Hart, S. Dowson, L. Charles-Smith, Y. Huang, and T. Quitugua. 2017. A Digital Tool for Open Source Biosurveillance across Federal Agencies. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 9(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7642
  • Corley, C., S. Volkova, J. Rounds, L. Charles-Smith, J. Harrison, J. Mendoza, and K. Han. 2017. Biosurveillance Using Clinical Diagnoses and Social Media Indicators in Military Populations. doi:10.2172/1345453
  • 2017. ChemAnalyzer: A text analytics platform for chemical surveillance. Abstracts of Papers of the American Chemical Society.
  • Huang, Z., K. Han, L. Charles-Smith, and M. Henry. 2017. Design science methodology applied to a chemical surveillance tool. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 2652-2658. doi:10.1145/3027063.3053263

2016

  • 2016. Distributed Doc2Vec Models for Fine-Grained Classification. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Data-Efficient Machine Learning.
  • Charles-Smith, L., C. Ringholz, B. Brintz, and C. Corley. 2016. Social Media Analytics for Post-Disasters Disease Detection in the Philippines. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 8(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v8i1.6467
  • Charles-Smith, L., A. Rittel, U. Pavalanathan, and C. Corley. 2016. Towards Influenza Surveillance in Military Populations Using Novel and Traditional Sources. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics 8(1). doi:10.5210/ojphi.v8i1.6468
  • 2016. Discourse, health and weil-being of military populations through the social media lens. AAAI Workshop - Technical Report.

2015

  • 2015. Monitoring wildlife interactions with their environment: An interdisciplinary approach. Journal of Ecology and Environmental Sciences.
  • Charles-Smith, L., T. Reynolds, M. Cameron, M. Conway, E. Lau, J. Olsen, J. Pavlin, M. Shigematsu, L. Streichert, K. Suda, and C. Corley. 2015. Using social media for actionable disease surveillance and outbreak management: A systematic literature review. PLoS ONE 10(10), e0139701. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0139701

2014

  • Charles-Smith, L., M. Rutledge, C. Meek, K. Baine, E. Massey, L. Ellsaesser, C. DePerno, C. Moorman, and L. Degernes. 2014. Hematologic parameters and hemoparasites of nonmigratory Canada geese (Branta canadensis) from greensboro, North Carolina, USA. Journal of Avian Medicine and Surgery 28(1), 16-23. doi:10.1647/2012-072
  • 2014. Integrating multiple databases to evaluate the impact of weather on animal movements. North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

2010

  • Charles-Smith, L., P. Cowen, and R. Schopler. 2010. Environmental and physiological factors contributing to outbreaks of cryptosporidium in coquerel's sifaka (Propithecus coquereli) at the Duke Lemur Center: 1999-2007. Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine 41(3), 438-444. doi:10.1638/2009-0160.1

2009

  • Charles-Smith, L., G. Lewbart, M. Aresco, and P. Cowen. 2009. Detection of Salmonella in gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) during two relocation efforts in Florida. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 8(2), 213-216. doi:10.2744/CCB-0771.1

2008

  • 2008. Characterization of root-knot nematode resistance in Medicago truncatula. Journal of Nematology.
  • 2008. Characterization of root-knot nematode resistance in Medicago truncatula. Journal of Nematology.

2005

  • Charles, L., I. Carbone, K. Davies, D. Bird, M. Burke, B. Kerry, and C. Opperman. 2005. Phylogenetic analysis of Pasteuria penetrans by use of multiple genetic loci. doi:10.1128/jb.187.16.5700-5708.2005
  • 2005. Phylogenetic Studies of Pasteuria penetrans Looking at the Evolutionary History of Housekeeping Genes and Collagen-like Motif Sequences. North Carolina State University, Raleigh. .