Professor’s portrait: Farzaneh Etminani wants AI to make a real difference in healthcare
Farzaneh Etminani is a new Professor of Machine Learning at Halmstad University. Her research lies at the intersection of AI and healthcare, focusing on how data and AI can contribute to better decision-making in healthcare. For her, being a professor also means taking responsibility for the next generation of researchers.
Farzaneh Etminani’s research includes information driven care. By using large amounts of data about healthcare and patients, researchers can identify patterns and provide better support for decision-making. One example is prediction models that can identify patients with heart failure who are at risk of hospital readmission.
For Farzaneh Etminani, it is important that technology is put to practical use.
“We try to solve the boring stuff with the help of all these advanced technologies and leave the precious patient-clinician time to be more spent on that, rather than on documentation”, says Farzaneh Etminani.
In the film, Farzaneh Etminani talks about her research, why she chose healthcare and what being a professor means to her.
Text and film: Anna-Frida Agardson
About Farzaneh Etminani
Farzaneh Etminani studied Computer Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran, where she received her master’s degree in 2007. She continued her doctoral studies at the same university and was a visiting PhD student at Linköping University in 2011–2012. In 2013, she received her PhD in Computer Science with the thesis Bayesian Network Structure Learning from Data.
Ferdowsi University is named after the poet Ferdowsi, who wrote Iran’s national epic, the Shahnameh. Farzaneh Etminani describes it as a fitting place to begin her academic career, given the importance Persian culture places on scholarship and passing knowledge on.
After completing her PhD, she worked as an Associate Senior Lecturer in Medical Informatics at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences in Iran from 2013 to 2019. It was there that her interest in applying AI to healthcare really took hold.
Farzaneh Etminani joined Halmstad University as a researcher in 2018 and became an an Associate Senior Lecturer (she writes: Assistant Professor) in Information Technology, specialising in Machine Learning, in 2020. She became a Docent in 2022 and Professor of AI and Machine Learning at Halmstad University in June 2026.
