About

I am a researcher and experienced educator passionate about studying the spine and musculoskeletal pain, with a current focus on machine learning and image analysis. My recent work combines deep learning, radiomics, and statistical modelling of imaging data to characterise spine degeneration trajectories for phenotyping and stratification. I also study the relationship between spine degeneration and chronic pain. As a lecturer in various capacities, I have taught anatomy, biomechanics, and clinical skills to trainee healthcare professionals since 2011. More recently, I have delivered teaching on AI in musculoskeletal healthcare and medical image analysis to engineers and computer scientists

Since 2021 I have focused on my reseach interests. I started this journey in Oulu, Finland, working on the PhD project “Automated quantification and phenotyping of lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration from clinical MRI with machine learning” supervised by Professors Simo Saarakkala (PI), Aleksei Tiulpin, and Jaro Karppinen. For the first 3 years I was an early career researcher with the MSCA Innovative Training Network Disc4All. I was then funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and BioCentre Oulu for the final stages of my doctoral research. In 2023 I was awarded an Ireland-USA Fulbright to visit the UCSF Core Center for Musculoskeletal Biology in Medicine. The results of my UCSF visit are published in the European Spine Journal and received the ISSLS Prize in Clinical Science 2026.