About

I was born in Tabriz, in the Azeri-speaking north-west of Iran. We left when I was about one, spent two toddler years in Turkey, and landed in Australia when I was three. I grew up carrying four languages in various states of repair, which is also the title of the essay that explains most of what you need to know about my family: we are people who arrived somewhere new and made it home.

I became a doctor at twenty-one, out of the University of Newcastle. The hospital years were Sydney: St George, Sutherland, Calvary Kogarah, and a stretch at the Forensic Hospital that taught me more about listening than any lecture ever managed. General practice was the specialty I chose because the one I actually wanted, all ages, minds and bodies and the mess between them, doesn't exist as a job title. The closest real thing is the complex end of general practice, so that's what I do: long appointments at Yarra Trail Medical in Melbourne's north-east, Thursdays and Fridays, mostly adult ADHD and autism, mental health, and the long problems.

The rest of the week I'm a senior context engineer at Doctronic, a US medical-AI company, working remotely from Melbourne. I came to AI as a clinician who had followed the field for years before it was something you could be hired to do. The two jobs are one discipline with two instruments: take a messy, high-stakes human problem, work it carefully, and stay willing to be wrong about any of it. When I write about medical AI on this site, that employment is the standing disclosure: the views are mine, not Doctronic's.

For the record-keepers: Bachelor of Medicine with Distinction from the University of Newcastle, Fellowship of the RACGP, membership of the Australian Society of Psychological Medicine, Focused Psychological Strategies training, and full AHPRA specialist registration as a general practitioner.

I have always built things. There are over a dozen electric guitars in this house that began as raw timber. When a flood destroyed the best room of the house, the licensed trades did the wiring and the bones and I spent eighteen months doing everything else, plastering, acoustics and the fit-out, because no builder wanted a one-room job. The same instinct runs through the audio rigs, the PC builds, the painted miniatures, and a long habit of reading philosophy of mind past midnight.

The personal record lives in the Life room: a son born on New Year's Day, who gets a standing promise that anything written about him comes down the moment he asks; parents who turned into grandparents in front of me; three cats with strong opinions. The speculative thinking, consciousness, machine minds, long futures, lives in Horizon, clearly labelled as thinking in public rather than things I claim to know.

This site is the canon: the durable record of how I think and what I care about, written for three readers: strangers trying to understand the shape of the mind, future me, and, eventually, my son. It is not my clinic's website, not a CV, not a newsletter, and not medical advice. It was built by hand with AI in the loop, and the judgements, the memories and the voice are mine.