I am currently a tenured Associate Professor of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics of the Perelman School of Medicine and Senior Faculty of the Institute of Biomedical Informatics (IBI) at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), and Director of the Health Language Processing (HLP) Center within the institute. I have positioned my research in the cross-cutting field of knowledge discovery through natural language processing, extracting unstructured information from clinical records, journal articles, and social media postings to elucidate data patterns, trends, and relationships that can aid the discovery process in pharmacoepidemiology, clinical research, and public health monitoring and surveillance. The UPenn HLP Center has made available novel approaches to the complete pipeline for information extraction from different sources using NLP, with over 75 publications in prestigious journals and conferences, making our code and datasets generally available for research. We have led state-of-the-art advances in social media mining through the organization of workshops and shared tasks at leading biomedical informatics and computational linguistics conferences. With 19 years of academic career plus 5 more as Software Engineer and Project Manager, I have a unique perspective with respect to the integration of research and applicable software systems, the need for their adequate construction and distribution, as well as with the effective management of interdisciplinary teams and federally funded research.