A willingness to try anything and an adventurous spirit have taken Justine Braguy on a journey from plant science Ph.D. student to CEO of AI startup Thya Technology.
About
Braguy came to KAUST in 2016, with a suitcase and a plan to stay for six months after starting a joint Ph.D. degree in Germany. But it was not long before she transferred her degree to Salim Al- Babili’s lab at KAUST, where she spent the next five years investigating the role of plant hormones, known as strigolactones.
Together with the invaluable help of Silvio Giancola — who worked in computer vision and AI — and his supervisor Bernard Ghanem, they devised an AI-based tool called SeedQuant to count Striga seeds automatically from still microscope images.
