I am currently a Marie Curie Research Fellow with the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge. My research and teaching is in the broad area of computer science and specifically in natural language processing (NLP). I have been active in research that employs computational techniques such as machine learning, NLP and ontologies to extract, normalise, integrate and interpret biomedical data from various sources. This is exemplified by the BioCaster project which I led – an experimental global health surveillance system that uses the Web to discover early warnings about infectious diseases reported in the news media. BioCaster was put into operation as part of a G7+WHO initiative called the Early Alerting and Reporting project.