My Story
During my medical school training, I established and managed a student research group named “Cell and Molecular Medicine”, beginning with theoretical sessions and later the group appended a laboratory. The result was outstanding, an abrupt flow of research projects, from which some high profile papers have been published. In addition, the group offered several workshops for students from all over the country and, ultimately, organized the “1st International Student Congress on Cell and Molecular Medicine” in 2011, in which I lead the group. My research at that time was mainly focused on stem cells and specifically mesenchymal stem cells and their applications in regenerative medicine.
After graduation from medical school, I joined Royan Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Technology. As a researcher in the “Beta Cell Research Program”, I took over responsibility for establishing a program of human islet transplantation. To pursue this goal, I received a scholarship for three months of training at the Diabetes Research Institute of San Raffaele Hospital, Milan, Italy. Besides, I worked on research projects to prevent immune rejection of transplanted mouse islets through co-transplantation of genetically modified mesenchymal stem cells.
During my graduate studies in the Experimental Medicine Program at the University of British Columbia (UBC), my research focused on a strategy based on the immunoregulatory activity of an enzyme called indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) to regulate the immune system for both transplantation and autoimmunity.
After receiving a Friedman Foundation Scholarship in Feb 2015, I joined Dr. Sykes’ lab at the Columbia University as a research scholar. The next year, she promoted my position to a postdoctoral researcher and I have been working in her lab since then. I have been working on different projects aiming at induction of immune tolerance to porcine antigens in xeno-transplantation, identifying the pathophysiology of type 1 diabetes, improving humanized mice models and understanding the factors involved in the selection of human T cells in the thymus. Immune tolerance is the main theme of my research either in the setting of transplantation or autoimmunity. Recently, I have started a line of research aimed at engineering T cells and regulatory T cells for treatment of cancer and autoimmunity. Since 2019, I have been working as an Associate Research Scientist. My future plan is to build a career working on immune tolerance as an independent researcher and group leader.
