Michaela Louka was 16 years old when she built an AI model capable of detecting and classifying breast cancer, a project...

Michaela Louka was 16 years old when she built an AI model capable of detecting and classifying breast cancer, a project that started as a high school elective and ended with her winning Australia's Young Scientist of the Year award at the national level. Born in Athens and raised in Australia from age four, Michaela enrolled in a research course called Science Extension during her final year of high school. The course had never been offered at her school before, and after her only classmate dropped out two months in, she was left to complete the project alone with her teacher. The teacher, by her own admission, knew little about AI and told Michaela she would have to figure out the technical side herself. She did. The result was a recurrent neural network for breast cancer classification using RNA sequencing data, a model Michaela designed, built, and analyzed entirely on her own. Her paper went on to win first place at the state level in New South Wales before taking the top national prize across all of Australia. Television appearances and magazine features followed, including a spot on the Today Show in Sydney in December 2025. The drive behind the research is personal. Michaela's father has battled four different types of cancer, including Hodgkin's lymphoma, lung cancer, thyroid cancer, and skin cancer, along with years of complications from treatment. Watching him go through it shaped her belief in personalized medicine, the idea that treatments should be tailored to each patient's biology to reduce harm and improve outcomes. She also credits growing up bilingual in Greek and English as an unexpected advantage. She believes the pattern recognition required to move between two languages gave her an intuitive feel for programming logic that she might not have developed otherwise. Michaela is currently continuing her research. Her story is one of the more remarkable to come out of the Greek-Australian community in recent years. #Greece #Science #GreekAustralia