Biography

Niki is a PhD student in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto, supervised by Professor Alex Mihailidis. Her doctoral research focuses on the development of AI-driven companion robots for persons with dementia, with a particular emphasis on multimodal emotion recognition and biography-driven personalization to support long-term emotional wellbeing and engagement.

Prior to her PhD, Niki completed her Master of Engineering in Computer Engineering at the University of Guelph, where she worked as a research assistant on two assistive technology projects: a hand-feeding robot designed to support patients with upper limb impairments in independent eating, and a VR-based rehabilitation game developed in Unity for upper limb motor recovery.

Niki completed her undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran, where she ranked 4th among all graduating students in her program.