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Ellen Araj, M.D.

Ellen Araj, M.D.

Titles and Appointments

Assistant Professor

School
Medical School
Department
Pathology
  • 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.