Dhiya is a Master’s student at Stellenbosch University, under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Petruccione and Prof. Ilya Sinayskiy.
She completed her undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Science (M Stream) majoring in Astronomy and Physics, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in 2023. She was awarded a scholarship from the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory for her undergraduate studies.
In 2024, she also completed her Honour’s degree in Physics at UKZN, under the supervision of Prof. Ilya Sinayskiy. She did an elementary project that used Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) to classify medical image data. The project was funded by the South African Quantum Initiative and consisted of various QCNN models being trained, validated and tested on the BreastMNIST dataset, a dataset consisting of low resolution breast cancer ultrasound images.
Realising the potential that lay within her Honour’s project, Dhiya began her Master’s degree at Stellenbosch University in early 2025. Her work focuses on quantum machine learning (QML) applications in the medical field with an emphasis on medical image processing and whether these applications pose advantageous to the traditional classical machine learning methods that are used in modern medicine and health digitisation, today.
Prior to her pursuit of a physics career, Dhiya initially studied ballet during her high school years. She got as far as completing her Intermediate and Advanced Foundation grades through the Royal Academy of Dance syllabus. In addition to being a retired ballet dancer, she is also an avid book lover, feminist and fashion history enthusiast.