PhD grad juggles newborn and breakthroughs in AI

Success has come in grand strides for Dr Shima Mohammadi Moghadam. In February, the Iranian scientist landed a stellar job at Toku Eyes, a New Zealand deep tech startup changing access and delivery of healthcare around the world.

In July, she welcomed her newborn daughter into the world. And in September, she celebrated her graduation with a doctorate from the Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI) at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland.

“What I have learned from the last few years,” says Shima, “is that when an opportunity comes, it might seem hard – but embrace it!”

Growing up in Tehran, supported by her parents and inspired by her secondary school physics teacher, Shima knew university would be part of her future.

“I wasn’t thinking about a PhD then, but I knew I would spend a long time at university. I had high grades.”

High grades indeed. When Shima sat Iran’s “very hard university entrance exam”, her results were among the top 100 students in the whole country.

Once she started her bachelors degree in mechanical engineering at Iran’s prestigious Sharif University of Technology, she discovered an interest in projects that impacted the health of people. For her masters project, Shima worked on musculoskeletal modelling and designed a novel device used in patients during spinal surgery.

“I realised then, that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life – to be a useful person and to do research to help people improve their health.”

At the same time, Shima kept coming across the same names.

“Most of the time, when I was reading articles in my area, I was encountering names, people in New Zealand. I discovered there was a musculoskeletal group at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute.”

She emailed. Six months later an opening arose to work under ABI’s Dr Julie Choisne to compare machine learning models’ accuracy in predicting the movements of and muscle forces of normal gait and the gait of people with impairments.

“I had no experience in machine learning and AI, but this was very interesting for me. I wanted to learn how I could implement AI in the field that I was an expert in – to combine machine learning and gait analysis of healthy people and people who were not able to walk normally.”

That was 2021. Borders were restricted due to Covid and Shima worked on her PhD remotely for 18 months before shifting to New Zealand.

“Julie was very supportive. I'm very grateful for all her help. I had everything I wanted: very good supervision, data and very good materials to understand the concepts of what I wanted to do.” 

Six months out from completion, Shima took up a full time internship as an artificial intelligence engineer at Toku Eyes, a company founded by Dr Ehsan Vaghefi, another Iranian bioengineer and a senior lecturer in the University of Auckland’s School of Optometry and Vision Science.

“I was a bit worried about whether I could manage both my PhD and a job at the same time,” says Shima. “It was challenging but I am very happy that I did that. I learned to work under pressure, and it helped me finish my PhD as soon as possible.”

Shima completed the four-year PhD degree in only three years, including the last six months in full time work. An effort that is “no mean feat”, says her supervisor Dr Julie Choisne. 

“I really like what I am doing now," Shima says. "Everything I learned in my PhD in those three years are actually used in my career now. That was a very good start for me.”

The team at Toku Eyes are predicting cardiovascular diseases from retinal images. By using that cardiovascular risk, they can predict bio-age – showing whether a person is older or younger than their chronological age.

“I was engaged in improving the bio-age model. We are also looking to predict kidney disease. There will be a lot of work to develop a good model to predict those kinds of diseases.

“This is what I really want for my job, to have something challenging, to be involved in something that is really novel. No one else is doing it in the world.”

Article by Megan Fowlie