It’s a long way from drawing outlines on MRI scans while watching football in a student flat to transforming how lung diseases are understood and treated. But that’s exactly the journey Joshua Astley has taken and it’s one driven not just by scientific curiosity, but by something deeply personal.
Joshua is a postdoctoral researcher in pulmonary MRI computing science in the POLARIS group at the University of Sheffield, working under Professor Jim Wild, a global leader in lung MRI. His work sits at the cutting edge of medical imaging and artificial intelligence, but his motivation is grounded in something very human: the memory of his father, who had COPD and lung cancer.
“I just felt like I was doing nothing good,” Joshua recalls of his placement at a defence engineering firm during his undergrad years in aerospace engineering. “I wanted to do something meaningful.”
That need for meaning led to Joshua reaching out to Professor Jim Wild and Dr Bilal Tahir at the University of Sheffield, offering to work in his evenings, simply because he wanted to help. “I was just drawing around different areas of the lungs while watching the footy. I wanted to save time, so I started developing an AI to do it for me. It wasn’t very good at first, but it was a start.”
That initial step eventually led to a PhD, followed by a postdoctoral role, and now to internationally used algorithms that help radiologists analyse lung scans more quickly, consistently, and with less manual effort. His segmentation model for lung cavities is now part of lung imaging analysis in centres worldwide.
But Joshua’s work isn’t just about building smart tools. It's about changing how we see, predict, and treat disease. His research spans a range of impactful projects: creating synthetic scans for patients who can’t undergo certain expensive or invasive imaging; developing AI models to predict the outcomes of lung cancer treatments or the longitudinal progression of COPD; helping clinicians choose the least invasive, but most effective interventions. The goal? To give patients the best quality of life, as quickly and safely as possible.
“In some cases, just reducing the time from scan to diagnosis from a week to a day can mean the difference between catching lung cancer early or too late,” he explains.
A significant part of Josh’s work also focuses on triaging patients who might benefit from hyperpolarized gas MRI—an advanced but not widely available imaging method pioneered by his lab. Using AI, Joshua aims to help predict whether a patient’s lung defects are severe enough to warrant this high demand scan, ensuring those most in need get seen first.
It’s deeply technical work, but Joshua doesn’t lose sight of the people at the centre of it. “Sometimes you see a kid with cystic fibrosis running around after being on a new treatment, and you know your analysis played a role in that. That’s what makes it all feel worth it.”
Joshua didn’t take the traditional path to get here. In fact, university wasn’t part of his original plan. At 15, Joshua began working in retail to help support his family and saw it as a possible long-term career. But driven by a natural curiosity and a desire to learn, he self-studied for his A-levels in his spare time and eventually applied to university through clearing to study engineering. What began as a fallback choice quickly proved to be much more. “It gave me a foundation in physics and maths that was perfect for understanding how MRI works.”
As a researcher, he’s not just writing papers for academic audiences, he’s now stepping into policy work, too. Through the Royal Society’s pairing scheme, Joshua has been working with Baroness Natalie Bennett on air pollution and diseases like silicosis, linking science with real-world policy to protect future generations.
Despite his success, working as a researcher does have its struggles. “A lot of the time, I’m not doing research, I’m writing funding applications, supervising students, and preparing for conferences. The research is the fun bit, but ensuring you can continue with your research does involve securing funding and that can be hard work.”
Still, he's pushing forward. Joshua recently won the Institute of Physics Best thesis award in Medical Physics and has applied for a fellowship to secure long-term funding, an opportunity to focus solely on solving the problems he cares most about.
Outside of work, Joshua stays active by playing five-a-side football and teaching judo at a local club, a sport he once competed in at county level, bringing a balance to a busy life.
“I never had this big dream to be a scientist,” he says. “I just didn’t want to spend my life doing something I didn’t care about.”
Now, through machine learning and lung scans, through segmentation algorithms and synthetic imaging, Joshua’s work is driven by a desire to create impact, not just in scientific circles, but in the lives of people affected by lung disease, like his dad.