Aline Talhouk PhD

Dr. Talhouk is an assistant professor in the department of Obstetrics & Gynecology in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. She is also the director of data science and informatics at OVCARE, BC’s ovarian and gynecological cancer research program. She completed her PhD in Statistics at the University of British Columbia in 2013 with a focus on computational statistics and machine learning. Since then, she has been working on developing and implementing predictive models to improve patient care in women’s health and oncology. Her research focus also includes the ethics of data sharing and privacy in the era of digital health and AI modeling.

Dr. Talhouk's current research program proposes to bring individualized care to endometrial cancer patients by using genetic characteristics of the cancer, as well as other data and risk factors, to predict which women are at higher risk of getting endometrial cancer, or having recurrent disease,  and directing them to the appropriate prevention strategy and therapeutic options. Dr. Talhouk is also researching the ethical use of innovative tools in digital health and informatics, including mobile health data and data from wearables. She is collaborating with researchers from computer science to build infrastructure that uses privacy preserving artificial intelligence and machine learning to derive predictive analytics that empower patients, without compromising their privacy.

She is a member of the Ovarian Tumour Tissue Analysis consortium and the Cascadia Data Discovery Initiative.