I grew up in Tehran, Iran. I received my Bachelors and Masters degrees in Physics in my hometown, before embarking on my US journey to a small, cute city named Providence. I did my graduate studies in the Physics Department of Brown University, discovering the world of swimming organisms, and meeting students and teachers from all over the world. This multicultural education counted as much as the academic education I received.
Then I moved to Paris and joined the Curie Institute’s then Physico-Chimie department as a postdoctoral researcher to learn about cell and tissue mechanics. This research lead me to the beautiful city of Strasbourg, where I started working in a developmental biology lab at the IGBMC. For the first time, I learned to experiment on a growing embryo. For a physicist like me, watching something grow and build structures was, and still is, spectacular. I joined the CNRS organization, the French National Research Center, while in Strasbourg and then left for one year as a visiting scientist to Harvard Medical School.
Currently, I am back to Paris, at Curie Institute, continuing to work on chicken embryos and trying to understand how certain structures obtain their shape under the action of mechanical stresses produced in an embryo. Stay tuned …
Hobbies
I am not very original with my hobbies. Movies, music, traveling, cooking, and gardening consist the essential part of what I do, when I am not in the lab. I am an eternal wannabe photographer.
I’m lacking any artistic fibre, but my mother was a great painter, check our her painting website.