Hi, I'm Maryam Mokhberi.
I use design and technology to help empower the marginalized communities.

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science, where I am supervised by Dr. Ishtiaque Ahmed at Thirdspace Lab. My study focuses on the nonprofit and donating activities of immigrants in relation to digital resources. I am also involved in a project that uses AI to address racial inequality in online forums, particularly COVID19-related anti-Asian hate speech on Twitter. Beyond the initiatives I have mentioned, I am generally interested in looking at socio-economic challenges like poverty, unemployment, and domestic violence from a design thinking perspective. Please visit the projects section for a list of my previous projects.

Before joining the Thirdspace Lab, I was working in the Rotman Research Institute under the supervision of Dr. Stephen Strother and Dr. Stephen Arnott. I developed a converter pipeline for the data management system of the Ontario Brain Insititute which converted their extensive MRI imaging database to the new globally defined Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS). I was also a member of the data curation team, helping in the development and application of multivariate statistical tools for outlier detection of complex data.

I received my master's in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Tom Chau. My study focused on investigating the short-term effect of meditation on the oscillations of brain EEG signals, where I gained knowledge about machine learning, statistics, and health-related programming skills. Specifically, I evaluated how meditation and mental rehearsal affect the classification accuracy of brain-computer interface (BCI) devices. I received my BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran. During my undergraduate years, I had the chance to do a research internship and design a cough detection module to be embedded in a dysphagia detection algorithm.

I enjoy meditation, reading books, and being in nature in my spare time. I also like astronomy and night sky observation.