Extended Bio

I am an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the Vanderbilt University. Before joining Vanderbilt, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Ohio State University working with Professor Kevin Coombes. I am currently supported by an NHGRI K99/R00 grant.

My research interests are machine learning, computational biology, and bioinformatics. Currently, I am working on the causal effect estimation of regulatory molecules on transcription. I also have ongoing collaborations with oncologists and working on interesting cancer-related problems such as drug screening and cancer progression modeling.

I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota in 2017. At the UMN, I worked on high dimensional statistics and social network analysis under the supervision of Professor Arindam Banerjee. I obtained my master’s degree (MSc) in Artificial Intelligence from University of Tehran. I was also an undergrad at the University of Tehran in Software Engineering. I spent a summer at Technicolor research working on electro-dermal signal modeling with Fernando Silveira.

It was my honor to study at the Alavi Institute during my high school years where I was blessed with great teachers and friends. I was a competitive swimmer in middle and high school and became a member of Tehran’s swimming and water polo teams. I was playing right wing in the mushroom formation. Later on, I became a member of University of Tehran’s swimming team.