Isaac Afara

Academy Research Fellow, Ph.D.

Personal Statement

Dr. Afara is an active early career researcher in applied biophotonics and computational modelling, with keen interest in machine and deep learning, and their application in biomedical engineering. He completed his doctoral degree in 2012 at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He later joined the Biophysics of Bone and Cartilage (BBC) research group at the Department of Applied Physics, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, in 2014 as a postdoctoral researcher, where he is currently an Academy of Finland Research Fellow. Dr. Afara, together with Professor Töyräs, leads the Optics and Spectroscopy team within the BBC group, consisting of 6 PhD students and 2 Postdoctoral researchers. He has secured more than €1.25M in funding in the last 3 years from sources including Academy of Finland.

Personal Information

  • Phone: +3580503501905
  • Room: ME 360
  • Email: isaac.afara[at]uef.fi
  • Year of birth:
  • 1 supervised Ph.D. thesis, 39 scientific papers, H-index 10 (Scopus) – 12 (Google Scholar)
  • Current research interests: Applied biophotonics in translational research; computational modelling in soft tissue spectroscopy; computer vision in microscopy/AI assisted pathology
  • Current and previous experience:
    • Academy Research Fellow, Department of Applied Physics, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland, 1.9.2018–
    • Grant Researcher, Department of Applied Physics, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland, 1.2.2017–31.8.2018
    • Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Applied Physics, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland, 9.1.2014–31.12.2016
  • Education:
    • Docent, Department of Applied Physics, University of Eastern Finland (Kuopio, Finland), 2015
    • Ph.D. (Medical Engineering), Science and Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia), 2012
    • B.Sc., Electrical & Electronics Engineering, University of Lagos, Nigeria, 2006
  • Skills: Programming in R, MATLAB, Python, C
  • Language proficiency:
    • Yoruba, native language
    • English, fluent
    • Finnish, basics
  • Membership in professional organizations:
    • Optical Society of America (Member)
  • Reviews for Scientific Journals:
    • Osteoarthritis and Cartilage
    • Annals of Biomedical Engineering
    • Tissue Engineering
    • Journal of Orthopedic Research
    • American Journal of Sports Medicine
    • Cartilage
    • Journal of Biomaterials Applications (JBA)
    • Biomedical Engineering/Biomedizinische Technik (BMT)
    • PLoS One
  • Hobbies: soccer, tennis
  • Awards:
    • Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award, 2013
    • Outstanding Higher Degrees Research (HDR) student, 2010
  • Lecturing: Practical Clinical Radiology