Doctoral Student

I received my BS degree in biology from University of Tehran and pursued a master's degree in biochemistry. Enjoying the friendly atmosphere, I am currently working on my PhD in Dr. Goodliffe's lab. Essentially, I work on fruit flies (scientists refer to them as drosophila), but that's too general, right? well, specifically I am looking at the mechanism of gene regulation by Myc, a celebrity in the transcription factors' community. Myc, reportedly, acts up now and then to make the cell crazy! by saying crazy, I mean cancer! That's why I care about Myc. I use a variety of techniques ranging from genetic screening and crosses for creating new transgenic flies to molecular biology (microarray, chromatic IP, qRT-PCR, etc.), to find out how Myc regulates expression of its targets at the genetics and epigenetics level. Recently, we found that there is something really cool out there, called "microRNA" and apparently this little non-coding microRNA has something to do with gene regulation and, much to our interest, to Myc.