Kaveri Thakoor, Ph.D., joins Columbia Ophthalmology to launch the Artificial Intelligence for Vision Science Lab

Kaveri Thakoor, Ph.D., recently joined the Department of Ophthalmology as Assistant Professor of Ophthalmic Science (in Ophthalmology) to launch the Artificial Intelligence for Vision Science Laboratory. Dr. Thakoor’s research focuses on transforming Artificial Intelligence (AI)/deep learning systems into teammates for ophthalmologists by tackling key challenges currently inhibiting the translation of AI to the clinic. Specifically, in her ongoing and proposed work, she aims to build robust, interpretable, and portable deep learning systems for the detection of ophthalmic diseases, such as glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Dr. Thakoor earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship recipient. Prior to that, she earned her B.S. with Honors in Chemistry from Stanford University and her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. Dr. Thakoor worked for two years as a research staff member on the Earthquake Early Warning algorithm development team at the California Institute of Technology Seismological Laboratory before joining Columbia. For her work, Dr. Thakoor was selected as the 2022 recipient of the Morton B. Friedman Memorial Prize for Excellence, a prestigious award conferred to a single doctoral student each year at Columbia School of Engineering for their leadership, academic excellence, creativity, and commitment to teaching. She received the Biomedical Engineering Young Scientist Award for Graduate Students and postdocs after being selected as a finalist to present at the “Future Biomedical Engineers Session” at NEBEC 2022. Most recently, Dr. Thakoor attended the 2022 MICCAI Conference in Singapore and earned the Best Paper Award in the FAIR MICCAI Workshop for her work in enhancing portable OCT image quality via GANs for AI-based eye disease detection.