Taran John

Taran Cyriac John is a PhD candidate in artificial intelligence at Victoria University of Wellington, where his thesis develops machine learning methods that extract clinically oriented features for skin cancer detection. His work on melanoma and basal cell carcinoma has won best paper and best presentation awards at leading conferences in the field, and he currently works with Dr Qurrat Ul Ain on AI-driven breast cancer risk prediction in Aotearoa. In 2025 he was awarded the New Zealand Space Scholarship to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he remains a research affiliate developing autonomous vision systems for spacecraft.