About
Physician-researcher in quantitative MRI and inflammatory bowel disease.
I am a physician and researcher at Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Most of my work circles around one question: how much can MRI actually tell us about inflammatory bowel disease. Not just whether disease is present, but whether it is active or chronic, reversible or fixed. Answering that has pulled me into quantitative imaging, measurement and validation, multilevel modelling, and eventually into building the computational tools myself, because the off-the-shelf ones were not quite right.
The longer version of how I got here is here.
Path
Jul 2023 — Present Research Associate, Lead, Ulcerative Colitis Imaging Programme Department of Radiology, Shariati Hospital, Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Supervisor: Prof. Amir Reza Radmard.
The core work is the UC cohort: MRE features, bowel wall activity, motility from GIQuant, chronicity markers, validated segment by segment against endoscopy. Getting the modelling right meant moving from logistic regression through several ML approaches to Bayesian multilevel models, which handle clustered patients, ordered outcomes, and individual-level uncertainty in a way simpler methods could not.
The questions kept expanding: how motility relates to inflammation and chronic structural change, how imaging indices are measured and validated, and how segment-level findings belong with biomarkers, endoscopy, histology, and symptoms. AI, LLMs, and other computational tools remain part of that work, but they serve the imaging questions rather than define them.
Ongoing Motilent · University College London, UK Quantitative colonic motility MRI in ulcerative colitis, in collaboration with Dr. Alex Menys and Dr. Iyad Naim (Motilent, London). The work applies GIQuant-derived displacement metrics to a UC cohort validated segment by segment against Mayo Endoscopic Subscores, with a focus on the relationship between motility, disease activity, and chronic structural damage. Two oral presentations delivered at ESGAR 2026, Montpellier. Manuscript under review at Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.
Ongoing Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York Prof. Jean-Frédéric Colombel (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) is a co-author on the motility MRI manuscript, contributing clinical expertise and manuscript review.
Mar 2023 — Jun 2023 Research Contributor, Abdominal Imaging Group Department of Radiology, Shariati Hospital, Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Began work on Crohn’s disease structural damage and Lémann Index scoring, which preceded the UC imaging programme, and developed the openly released Lémann Index Calculator. Explored abdominal imaging research questions with Prof. Radmard before proposing the UC activity programme in July 2023.
Jul 2022 — Jul 2024 General Practitioner · Valiasr Local Medical Center Part-time clinical work in Alborz during the transition into full-time research. This is also when I started teaching myself Python properly: DataCamp, then 3Blue1Brown, then building things until they worked.
Dec 2022 — Jun 2023 Research Contributor, Imaging and Clinical Data Science Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. CT and MRI projects: protocol review, dataset construction, statistical analysis. Contributed to PanCanAID-related pipelines including curated datasets and semi-automated CT segmentation workflows.
May 2020 — May 2022 Medical Internship Teaching hospitals of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran. Two years of rotations across internal medicine, surgery, paediatrics, obstetrics, emergency, and outpatient clinics. I thought I wanted to be a surgeon. I was wrong, but the clinical instincts stayed.
2015 — 2022 Doctor of Medicine (MD) Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran. The girl who actively avoided research in medical school. People change.
Get in touch
The fastest way to reach me is by email. If you are working on quantitative imaging in IBD, imaging measurement and validation, multimodal studies, or any of the methods above, I would like to hear from you.