Flash News

Accident at "Shkalla e Tujanit", truck overturns in the middle of the road, driver injured

Vlora by-pass, work delays and cost increases

Milan are expected to give up on the transfer of Granit Xhaka

Inceneratori jashtë funksionit, përfshihet nga flakët fusha e mbetjeve në Elbasan

Accident on the Lezhë-Shëngjin axis, one injured

E-TJERA

Meet Kozeta Miliku, named one of the top five scientists in Canada

Politiko 2025-07-01 16:32:12

The prestigious Globe and Mail magazine has selected five female scientists in Canada who have made significant advances in health, science and medicine.

It also includes an Albanian, Kozeta Miliku (clinical epidemiology, early life exposures, ultra-processed foods, obesity).

Who is Kozeta Miliku?

Growing up in Albania, one of Kozeta Miliku’s favorite games was playing doctor, with her cousin taking on the role of pharmacist. With the help of a neighbor—a real pharmacist—who would give them empty medicine bottles, they would spend many hours playing this imaginary game. “I always dreamed of becoming a doctor,” she says. “I wanted to save people.”
She later went to medical school, but toward the end of her residency, she realized that many diseases are preventable.
“I often saw the consequences of chronic diseases, but what I became increasingly interested in were the causes that occur earlier,” she says. “I wanted to understand how early exposure, even before birth, affects health throughout life.”
Dr. Miliku moved into the field of clinical epidemiology and today, at 37, is an assistant professor in the Department of Food Sciences at the University of Toronto, where she directs a lab that studies factors that influence long-term health.
Her research has uncovered troubling facts, such as that 3-year-old Canadian children get nearly half of their daily calories from highly processed foods – putting them at risk for obesity.
This year, she published a study that found that children born to fathers who are obese or overweight at the time of conception are more likely to develop obesity.
Her research is based largely on data from the CHILD study – the research initiative that brought her to Canada and where she currently serves as clinical science officer.
Since 2009, CHILD researchers have followed thousands of children from birth, collecting information on their health and physical samples at various stages – from babies’ blood and stool to indoor dust. The result is a robust database that has produced over 200 published scientific articles.
“It’s a world-renowned research initiative,” she says. “A fantastic study, one of the largest we have in Canada.”
After graduating from the Medical University of Tirana in 2013, she went to the Netherlands to pursue her master’s and doctorate degrees at Erasmus University Medical Center, where she worked on the Generation R study.
She was fascinated by breastfeeding, especially its positive impact on kidney development. “I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I was wondering: what is it in breast milk that brings these health benefits?”
She searched for breast milk experts, and the first name she found was Meghan Azad—a lecturer at the University of Manitoba and deputy director of CHILD. She immediately sent her an email, and they connected the next day. “She said, ‘Will you work as a postdoctoral researcher in my lab?’” she recalls with a laugh. “It happened very quickly.”
After moving to Manitoba in 2017, she worked with Azad to continue the study on breast milk, investigating components that might protect against childhood asthma and allergies. Three years later, she was called to McMaster University — CHILD’s national collaborating center — where she was named the study’s clinical science officer.
In this role, she designs protocols for well-child visits and consults with CHILD’s extensive network of experts to decide what data to collect and what research questions to pursue.
Dr. Miliku says CHILD researchers want to empower participants, which has helped the study maintain a high level of participation — even during the pandemic. Last summer, CHILD asked some of the participating teens what they would like the researchers to focus on. “They said mental health — which wasn’t a key focus of the study at first,” she says. “But now we’re putting a lot of emphasis on mental health.”
Although she has a long career ahead of her, she hopes that by the time she reaches the end of her career, she will have fulfilled her childhood goal – to save people by stopping diseases before they develop.
“My goal is to improve the health and well-being of Canadian families through prevention in the early stages of life,” she says. “Before problems arise.”