Dr. Blake holds a joint appointment as a Professor in the School of Information Sciences (the iSchool) and a Health Innovation Professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, both at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She was a faculty fellow at the National Institutes of Health (2017-18). Her affiliations include the School of Computing and Data Science, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Illinois Informatics Institute (I3) and the Personalized Nutrition Initiative (PNI). She has served in several administrative roles in the iSchool include the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (2023-25), Program Director for Information Management (MSIM) and the campus wide MS in Bioinformatics (Bio) programs (2019-2022) and as Associate Director for the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (2011-2021).

Blake was Principal Investigator of the NSF’s Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH,NSF), which received the Synergy Award from the Chicago Council on Science and Technology (c2st) in 2025, and typifies her work in Artificial Intelligence that considers how data production practices should be factored into any subsequent analysis. For example, the Socio-technical Data Analytics (SODA) Project combines technical (mathematical modeling, databases, social networking, and text mining) and social (economic, ethical, policy, and political) aspects of data analytics. Both SODA courses became required in the new MS in Information Management that now enrolls more than 340 students per year.

Her foundational work on how experts synthesize evidence from scientific literature has been recognized with best paper awards from the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), the leading journal in Information Science. Many of those ideas were developed in the Evidence-Based Discovery project (EBD), in particular the Claim Framework (2010) that captures how scientists describe their results along with automated methods to replicate and extend those practices. She has worked with colleagues to develop a cadre of health data literate ambassadors, extract critical facets of privacy statements and estimate risk as part of a big data-theoretic approach to quantify organizational failure mechanisms in probabilistic risk assessment (NSF abstract).

Dr. Blake’s scholarship has been supported by federal funding agencies (NSF, IMLS, NIH) and industry (CSL/Behring, Cisco, John Deere) and she brings industrial experience as a software developer, formal training in information and computer science and almost two decades of research experience in text mining and natural language processing, primarily in biomedicine to any project. The research page lists current and former projects and the publications page captures links to most published articles that are also listed in her curriculum vitae (last updated December, 2021). 

Before joining UIUC, Blake was an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a graduate student in the School of Information and Computer Science (ICS) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Going further back she was a student in the Faculty of (Informatics) at the University of Wollongong (UoW) in Australia (translation note: Aussies call a School a Faculty). She also worked as a research scientist for BHP Melbourne Research Labs (MRL) and as a programmer analyst for BHP Information Technology, entities that have been bought, merged, and sold many times since Blake moved to academe. Dr. Blake regularly teaches AI in Health (BSE712), an introductory course on databases (IS455) and a project-based course on text mining (IS567).

Contact Details

School Information Sciences
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Room 5090, 614 E. Daniel St.
Champaign, IL 61820-6212
Telephone:(217) 333 0115
Facsimile: (217) 244 3302
Email: cl followed by my last name @illinois.edu