About

I am a researcher and experienced educator passionate about studying the spine and low back pain, with a current focus on machine learning and image analysis approaches. 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. I have also designed and taught multiple in-person and remote postgraduate courses in South Korea and more recently have delivered teaching on AI in musculoskeletal healthcare and medical image analysis to engineers and computer scientists. I am experienced in programme, curriculum, and module design for professionally (GOsC) approved healthcare courses in the UK. I use diverse teaching methods including practical sessions (e.g., human cadaveric dissection), lectures, recording and online content, flipped classroom, and a wide variety of assessment approaches including MCQs, written exams, professional portfolios, OSPEs, and OSCEs.

Since 2021 I have focused on my research interests. I started this journey in Oulu, Finland, working on the PhD project “automated phenotyping of lumbar intervertebral disc degeneration from clinical MRI” 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 were accepted for publication in the European Spine Journal where the paper was awarded the prestigious ISSLS Prize in Clinical Science 2026.