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Mucosal immunology, HIV, The role of microbiota in modulating immune responses

I hold a Master degree in Virology from Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. I have worked for two years in the field of HIV in Keyvan virology lab which is the reference virology lab in Tehran. During this period, I had the opportunity to understand the burdens of reducing HIV transmission in Iran. As a graduate student involved with HIV/AIDS issues, I was always concerned about finding prevention strategies to reduce HIV transmission. In Iran, drug injection and sexual transmission are two main routes of HIV transmission. However, it was difficult to study how HIV-sexual transmission could be reduced, since sex and HIV sexual transmission is a stigma in the Iranian community. This was the main reason that I joined Dr. Kaul’s lab, University of Toronto as a PhD student in 2015, where the main focus is the genital immune correlates of HIV-transmission and susceptibility. Dr. Kaul has extensive experience on HIV transmission and immune correlates of HIV susceptibility, studying for more than 20 years in Canada, Uganda and Kenya. Since joining his lab, I enhanced my knowledge on HIV, Immunology, how to perform clinical trials, the ethics in research and new techniques such as flow cytometry.

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