Susanne M. Humphrey is an information scientist and leader of the MedIndEx (Medical Indexing Expert) project at NLM's Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC), where she has been working in the area of knowledge-based systems for the past fourteen years. The MedIndEx system is a prototype for interactive computer-assisted indexing of the biomedical literature in NLM's MEDLINE database using terms from the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) thesaurus. The system is written in a frame-based knowledge representation language on top of the Lisp programming language, and employs an X Windows interface. Plans are under way to conduct an empirical study using objective criteria to evaluate MedIndEx as a feasibility assessment for the knowledge-based approach to subject indexing.
Humphrey is author of numerous publications on her research, including 1988 Best JASIS Paper, and a textbook in the field of information retrieval. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, cited for her "research and professional contributions in the area of information science, particularly in knowledge-based expert systems, database indexing, and information retrieval."
Humphrey is active in ASIS (American Society for Information Science), having served as Chair of SIG/CR (Special Interest Group for Classification Research) in 1990. She co-chaired the 1st ASIS SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop at ASIS '90 in Toronto, and co-edited the proceedings, published by Learned Information as Advances in Classification Research, 1991 (winner of 1991 Best ASIS SIG Publication). The CR Workshop has been a pre-conference at ASIS Annual Meetings since its founding. Humphrey's other affiliations include AAAS, AAAI, ACM, IEEE-CS, MLA, SLA, ALA, and ACS.
Previous to joining LHNCBC, she worked sixteen years in NLM's Library Operations Division in various phases of MEDLARS (MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) since it's inception, including indexing, searching, user services and training, database management, and thesaurus management.