Mahsa Moteshakeri

Dr Mahsa Motshakeri joined the School of Pharmacy as a postdoctoral research fellow in April 2021. She received her MSc degree in Food Science (Functional Foods) from the University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia (2011) and a PhD degree in Food Science (Electrochemical Sensors) at the School of Chemical Sciences at The University of Auckland (2019). Her PhD thesis was to develop a conducting polymer-based electrochemical sensor to detect antioxidants such as uric acid and ascorbic acid in milk. In 2018, she won a Metrohm young chemist award in New Zealand for her outstanding research output on developing the milk antioxidant sensor. In the same year, she won the first poster prize at one of the biggest electrochemistry conferences (ISE conference 2018) in Bologna, Italy.

In April 2019, she started her academic career as a research technician in the research group of Professor Anthony R. J. Phillips at the School of Biological Sciences to assist in electrochemical detection of antioxidants in complex matrixes such as biological samples. Then in 2020, she received a six-month Callaghan Innovation Grant from a wine company to develop an enzyme biosensor for them, which was a collaboration with Professor Paul Kilmartin at The University of Auckland.

She has diversified experience in a range of food science topics as well, such as storage and physicochemical studies of ripening fruits (e.g. Noni), amylase and lipoxygenase enzymes purification and characterization, seaweed extraction, study of Type I or Type II diabetes mellitus in Sprague-Dawley rats, HPLC, GCMS, and histopathology of rats’ organs. So far, she has several publications that can be seen on her scholar google page (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=gr_Mq20AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate), However, her current research focuses on developing an electrochemical sensor to detect non-transferrin bound iron (NTBI). The current project targets the creation of a diagnostic tool with clinical applications to analyse free toxic iron directly in patients’ blood.

For more information about Mahsa’s research and publications click HERE

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