bio

As a child, I was fascinated by science, 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 university-level biology books and learning about genetics, botany, biochemistry, molecular biology, ecology, and human physiology. That was when my very first exposure to neuroscience happened. Although I didn’t succeed in the Biology Olympiad (was a semi-finalist), it really changed my perspective on myself and life. As a result of this experience, and because I had learned seemingly difficult concepts on my own, I was more ambitious than ever.

I entered medical school specifically to become a researcher in either neuroscience or genetics. Soon I realized that I’m actually more interested in neuroscience than genetics, perhaps because there seemed to be an infinite number of difficult questions in this field. At the time, I read about a group of medical students in Iran who had formed a cognitive neuroscience research group, and were now accomplished neuroscientists [ref]. I was really inspired by them, and was determined to follow in their footsteps. So I started studying neuroscience by reading Bear’s “Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain”, and also some chapters of Kandel’s “Principles of Neural Science”. Down the way, I learned about the field of computational neuroscience by reading an introductory book (“From Computer to Brain: Foundations of Computational Neuroscience”). Given my life-long interest in mathematics and computers, I was fascinated by computational neuroscience. Thereafter, I learned a variety of mathematical and computational skills, in addition to Python programming, using different books and online courses, which was a challenging yet rewarding experience. Unfortunately, after the more difficult clinical years of medical school started, my progress in computational neuroscience slowed down. However, during the clinical years, I studied statistics in depth and gained experience in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which came in handy later.

Just before graduating from the medical school, I wasn’t as busy as before, and at the same time was lucky enough to participate in the 5th Iranian Human Brain Mapping Congress, where I met my current supervisor, Dr. Masoud Tahmasian. In this conference I realized that neuroimaging offers everything that I’m looking for, at the intersection of my interests in mathematics and computational techniques, neuroscience, technology, and doing clinically useful research. Soon I started my first neuroimaging research project, which building up on my skills in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, was a coordinate-based neuroimaging meta-analysis on late-life depression. This project was a great introduction to the field of neuroimaging, as I needed to read many neuroimaging papers using different imaging methods and learn about them. Now, I’m happy to be involved in several interesting neuroimaging projects, and I’m looking forward to a future in my dream career as an academic in the fields of neuroimaging and computational neuroscience.