Biography

Dr. Ellen King Araj completed her undergraduate education in 2003 with a BS in Bioinformatics. She then moved to Dallas and completed her medical education at UT Southwestern Medical Center (2003-2008).

Between medical school and residency (2007-2008) she participated in a Dean’s Fellowship within the Bioinformatics Research Laboratory at UT Southwestern.  During that year, she used her background in medicine and computer science to re-write and optimize a data mining program (Iridescent) that utilized unsupervised machine learning algorithms to scan 16 million abstract articles in Medline and predict potential novel associations between drugs, genes, and diseases.

She completed an anatomic and clinical pathology residency at UT Southwestern Medical School (2008-2012) and is certified in Anatomic Pathology and Clinical Pathology by the American Board of Pathology.  During residency, she was an active CAP and USCAP resident forum delegate (2008-2010) and received two travel awards to the Association for Pathology Informatics (API) (2008; 2012).

After residency, she completed a general surgical pathology fellowship (2012-2013) at UT Health Science Center San Antonio and was awarded the Rolf Scott Award Recognition of Excellence in Teaching. 

She then worked as a physician scientist at the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI; 2015). While at PCCI, her role was product owner of the WhiteCoat Chart Review Tool, a natural language processing program that analyzed clinical notes to aid in retrospective clinical surveillance (patent application; WO2017070255A1). She led the product design of the future enterprise software version and worked closely with a multispecialty team including medical subspecialists, computer programmers, natural language processing experts, statisticians, and business experts.  During that time, she was also a laboratory director for several clinical laboratories across the Dallas-Fort-Worth metroplex.

She subsequently decided to return to academia and completed a subspecialized genitourinary pathology fellowship at UT Southwestern Medical Center (2016-17).  During this fellowship she focused her research on developing and programming “PathOS”, a natural language processing computational tool that expedites extraction of pathology free-text data into structured fields. This project was supported by the Kidney Cancer SPORE project grant.

Currently she is technical director of the referrals and immunology clinical laboratories at UT Southwestern Medical.  She is actively involved in using her programming skills to interpret complex laboratory data to aid in test utilization decisions.

Education

Medical School
Univ of Tx Southwestern Med Ct (2008), Medicine

Research Interest

  • Creating custom computer algorithms to answer complex medical questions
  • Laboratory Utilization
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Pathology Informatics

Publications

Featured Publications LegendFeatured Publications

Ontological analyses reveal clinically-significant clear cell renal cell carcinoma subtypes with convergent evolutionary trajectories into an aggressive type.
Cai Q, Christie A, Rajaram S, Zhou Q, Araj E, Chintalapati S, Cadeddu J, Margulis V, Pedrosa I, Rakheja D, McKay RM, Brugarolas J, Kapur P, EBioMedicine 2019 Dec
Does proximity of positive prostate biopsy core to capsular margin help predict side-specific extracapsular extension at prostatectomy?
Singla N, Walker JT, Woldu SL, De La Fuente K, Araj E, Swartz B, Kapur P, Roehrborn CG Can J Urol 2019 Feb 26 1 9634-9643
Tumour biomarker expression relative to age and molecular subtypes of invasive breast cancer.
Morrison DH, Rahardja D, King E, Peng Y, Sarode VR Br. J. Cancer 2012 Jul 107 2 382-7
Primary adenocarcinoma of the urinary bladder: value of cell cycle biomarkers.
Kapur P, Lotan Y, King E, Kabbani W, Mitra AP, Mosbah A, Abol-Enein H, Ghoneim M, Youssef RF Am. J. Clin. Pathol. 2011 Jun 135 6 822-30
Expression of cell cycle-related molecular markers in patients treated with radical cystectomy for squamous cell carcinoma of the bladder.
Youssef RF, Shariat SF, Kapur P, Kabbani W, Ghoneim T, King E, Cockburn A, Mosbah A, Abol-Enein H, Ghoneim M, Lotan Y Hum. Pathol. 2011 Mar 42 3 347-55
Risk factors and attributable mortality of late aspergillosis after T-cell depleted hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
Mihu CN, King E, Yossepovitch O, Taur Y, Jakubowski A, Pamer E, Papanicolaou GA Transpl Infect Dis 2008 Jun 10 3 162-7

Honors & Awards

  • Rolf Scott Award Recognition of Excellence in Teaching (UTHSCSA)
    (2013)
  • Association for Pathology Informatics (API) Travel Award
    (2012)
  • Association for Pathology Informatics (API) Travel Award
    (2008)
  • CAP and USCAP Residents Forum Delegate
    (2008-2010)
  • Baylor Computer Science Department Community Service Award
    (2003)
  • Fall 2001 Baylor School of Engineering and Computer Science Outstanding Student Award
    (2001)