Nicholas Dobbins, Ph.D., MLIS

Director of Clinical Research Informatics

Co-Lead, Clinical Research Informatics Supporting Principal Investigators (CRISPI)

Ph.D., University of Washington

MLIS, University of Washington

B.A., University of Minnesota

301-443-7837

nic.dobbins@nih.gov

Dr. Dobbins’ research and development efforts center on creating intuitive, user-centered tools for biomedical discovery and data extraction from electronic health records. He is the creator of Leaf, a widely used self-service cohort discovery platform capable of querying multiple biomedical databases and running “networked” queries across research institutions.

During his PhD in Biomedical Informatics at UW, Dr. Dobbins pioneered NLP and LLM fine-tuning approaches to generate database queries identifying patients eligible for clinical trials. His research was the first to empirically show that machine learning models could outperform human programmers in identifying eligible patients using real-world clinical trial data. He also holds a Master of Library and Information Science from UW and a BA in History and Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Minnesota.

 Dr. Dobbins’ expertise spans software engineering, database architecture, user interface design, information extraction, automated biomedical reasoning, data de-identification, and AI-driven clinical research analytics. His current interests include mechanistic interpretability, AI-assisted database query optimization, and practical applications of LLMs to accelerate scientific discovery.