Career History

May 2022- present: Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, Davis.

Academic Qualifications

Both my M.Sc. (2012-2015) and Ph.D. (2015-2022) are in Biotechnology and Molecular Genetic of Horticultural Science at the University of Tehran, Iran.

My M.Sc. project was focused on polymorphism study and gene expression profiling in key genes involved in cannabinoids pathway and quantitative analysis of cannabinoids in different tissues, different growth stages and different type of cannabis.

As a Ph.D. student, I continued to the detection of phytochemical fingerprinting of cannabinoids and investigation of genetic diversity, genome structure and genome association in cannabis resources using Genotyping-By-Sequencing (GBS) towards breeding programs improvement.

In 2019, I joined Taylor lab in the Department of Plant Sciences at University of California, Davis as a visiting scholar where I developed my laboratory skills and the techniques suitable for the quantifying the genome structure and its relation to metabolomics and completing my PhD which supported and funded by Biopharmaceutical Research Company (BRC) as a collaboration between UC Davis and BRC.

Now, as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis which started from May 2022, I continue to focus on the poplar bioenergy project funded by the Department Of Energy (DOE) to undertake molecular analysis for RNA Seq and data analysis, network analysis and also establishing a tissue culture system for transient assays of gene expression for candidate genes, with a combination of wet laboratory and computer-based bioinformatics.

Research Interests

The recent discoveries of the medicinal properties of cannabis and the cannabinoids in addition to their potential applications in the pharmaceutical and industrial fields have given momentum to the quest for further understanding the chemistry, genome structure and transcriptome of this plant and accelerate breeding programs in this plant.

My main research interest is multiple omics approaches such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics towards breeding development of medicinal plants. I am interested in understanding of molecular functioning of biological systems in plants in both parts of lab wet and bioinformatics. I am also keenly interested in developing tissue culture system and genome editing through CRISPR technology in cannabis to develop uniform plants with desired economically important traits which can be utilized commercially as I am now establishing this system for poplar during my postdoc.