Fakrul Islam Tushar, PhD

Dr. Tushar is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the University of Arizona. He earned his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University in 2025, where he conducted research in health AI and generative AI at the Center for Virtual Imaging Trials (CVIT). Prior to his doctoral studies, he served as a Research Associate at Duke University Medical Center from 2019 to 2021. He holds an MSc in Medical Imaging and Applications through the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master (MaIA) program and a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB).

Dr. Tushar directs the Tushar Lab, a newly established research group advancing data-centric AI for healthcare and medicine through data discovery, intelligent tools, and the integration of clinical, simulated, and synthetic datasets. His work spans large-scale data curation using weak supervision and human-AI collaboration, virtual imaging trials for reproducible in-silico evaluation, and generative modeling for synthetic medical image creation. The lab's overarching goal is to develop trustworthy, rigorously evaluated, and clinically grounded AI systems for healthcare and medical imaging.

Dr. Tushar's research has been published in leading venues including Medical Image Analysis, Radiology: Artificial Intelligence, SPIE Journal of Medical Imaging, and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, with presentations at RSNA and SPIE Medical Imaging. He is committed to open and reproducible science; his toolkits, datasets, and benchmarking resources are publicly available through his GitHub and lab website. He is the recipient of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Scholarship and has been recognized with Best Poster awards at the International Summit of Virtual Imaging Trials in Medicine (2024) and the Duke All Pratt Poster Competition (2022).