Shiva Akhtarian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mechanical Engineering program at York University. She is co-supervised by Professor Pouya Rezai and Professor Satinder Kaur Brar. Shiva's research is focused on studying the physics of Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) in electrochemical biosensing applications, where she aims to synthesize virus and bacteria-specific MIPs and employ them as recognition agents to develop low-cost, portable, and sensitive point-of-need microfluidic biosensors to detect microorganisms in water.