Dr Akanksha Bhargava is a Lecturer and Early Career Academic Fellow in the School of Biomedical Engineering at UNSW Sydney. Her research investigates how imaging across scales and modalities can be integrated to understand biological structure and function in disease. She develops multimodal biomedical imaging and imaging data science approaches spanning micro-computed tomography, light-sheet microscopy, magnetic resonance imaging and hyperspectral imaging, with a focus on vascular and cellular dysfunction in cancer and neuroscience.

Her PhD and postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine, USA established her expertise in multiscale vascular imaging and image-based computational hemodynamic modeling, leading to the development of VascuViz (Nature Methods, 2022), a multimodal vascular imaging framework for 3D mapping of vascular structure and function. This work also enabled the development of a three-dimensional in-silico angiogenesis atlas for breast cancer. At UNSW, she is extending this work through multimodal data integration and AI-enabled approaches to disease phenotyping and biomarker discovery. Her research has been recognised through the 2020 North American Microcirculatory Society Emerging Leaders Award and a 2025 UNSW Founders Early Career Academic Startup Fellowship supporting research translation biomedical imaging research.