Kozeta Miliku: The Albanian Researcher Revolutionizing Early-Life Health
Kozeta Miliku – The Albanian Scientist Transforming How We Understand Health from the Very Start of Life
This year, the prestigious Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail selected five early career scientists (3 woman and 2 males) who are making outstanding contributions to health, science, and medicine. Among them is an inspiring name from Albania – Dr. Kozeta Miliku – whose groundbreaking research is changing how we understand the roots of lifelong health.
Raised in Albania, Dr. Miliku’s passion for helping others began early, when she played imaginary doctor games with her cousin using empty medicine bottles donated by a friendly neighborhood pharmacist. “I always dreamed of becoming a doctor,” she says. “I wanted to save lives.”
That dream led her to medical school in Tirana, where she soon realized that many diseases could be prevented before they needed to be treated. This insight shifted her focus from clinical medicine to preventative health through science.
After graduating from the University of Medicine in Tirana, she pursued her master’s and PhD at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, contributing to the major Generation R study. It was during this time that she became fascinated by the benefits of breastfeeding, particularly its positive effects on kidney development in infants.
Her interest in human milk led her to Canada, where she contacted Dr. Meghan Azad, a prominent breastfeeding researcher and deputy director of the CHILD Study – Canada’s largest birth cohort research project. Dr. Miliku joined her lab as a postdoctoral researcher in 2017, later moving to McMaster University as Clinical Science Officer for the CHILD Study.
Today, at just 37, Dr. Miliku is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and leads a lab focused on the early-life risk factors for chronic disease. Her research has revealed alarming trends – including that nearly half of the daily calories consumed by Canadian 3-year-olds come from ultra-processed foods, significantly increasing their risk of obesity.
In one of her most recent studies, she found that children born to overweight or obese fathers at the time of conception are more likely to develop obesity themselves – highlighting the underappreciated role of paternal health.
As part of the CHILD Study, Dr. Miliku works with a wide network of experts to develop protocols for follow-up visits, determine what data to collect, and identify key research priorities. Recently, CHILD began incorporating more input from adolescent participants – who asked for a greater focus on mental health. “That wasn’t one of the initial goals,” she explains, “but we’re now paying a lot more attention to it.”
Though she still has a long scientific career ahead, Dr. Miliku hopes to fulfill the mission that began in childhood – to save lives, not in the emergency room, but long before diseases ever appear.
“My goal is to improve the health and well-being of Canadian families through early-life prevention,” she says. “Before the problems arise.”