bio

I was fascinated by science as a child, wanting to learn everthing there is in the world, and the school library was my happy place. Before high school I developed a keen interest in biology, by reading about the evolution of species, and the fascinating details of molecular and cellular biology. There is a yearly biology competition among high school students in Iran called Biology Olympiad, in which I was naturally intersted and took part. I spent most of my time in high school self-studying biology textbooks and learning about genetics, botany, biochemistry, molecular biology, ecology, and human physiology. That was when my very first exposure to neuroscience happened.

In 2011, after finishing high school, I started studying medicine at the Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, which is one of the top medical schools in Iran and was also located in my hometown, Mashhad. I joined medical school specifically to pursue my dream career in academia, with the aim of applying for a PhD program afterwards. With this goal in mind, and given my fascination with computational neuroscience, during the medical school I studied several neuroscience books, learned programming, completed online courses in mathematics and neuroscience, learned statistics and research methodology, and performed a few research projects. In fall 2018, a few months before finishing the medical school, I got to know Dr. Masoud Tahmasian in a conference, and joined his team at the Institute of Medical Science and Technology, Shahid Beheshti University, to do neuroimaging research as a non-resident researcher. This was a great opportunity, as the field of neuroimaging was at the intersection of my interests in mathematics and computational techniques, neuroscience, technology, and doing clinical research. Under supervision of Dr. Tahmasian, I worked on several research projects as the main author or collaborator, mainly focusing on the neuroimaging of neuropsychiatric disorders. During this period, I learned many neuroimaging data analysis techniques and improved my programming, mathematics and computational neuroscience skills, as well as my written and spoken communication in English.

In fall 2021, I started my PhD program at the Cognitive Neurogenetics Lab situated at the MPI CBS (Leipzig, Germany) and INM-7, Research Center Jülich (Jülich, Germany), under the supervision of Dr. Sofie Valk.