Biography
Farida Ahangari is an Assistant Professor in the Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at Yale. Her main interest is to understand the pathogenesis of pulmonary fibrosis and the metabolic regulatory counterpart of this fatal disease. Her studies focus on the role of metabolic reprogramming in the pathogenesis of chronic lung diseases and aim to test targeted cell specific therapy using microRNA/noncoding RNAs for different diseases.

Dr. Ahangari trained as M.D. from Iran University of Medical Sciences in Tehran and have spent most of her professional life in medical research afterward. She started her research training in one of the world’s premier cancer groups, the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia (QIMR). During this research fellowship, she learned about the role of ATM (Ataxia Telangiectasia Mutated protein) in oxidative stress and DNA damage response in cancer and mastered in primary Purkinje cell isolation from newborn mice to study metabolic changes, tissue transplant and small survival surgery on different murine cancer models.

After arriving at Yale in 2008, she joined Professor Jack Elias’s lab in the Pulmonary section as a postdoctoral fellow, focusing on various animal and cellular models of lung inflammation and fibrosis, as well as studying the link between metabolism and lung biology. She joined Professor Naftali Kaminski’s lab at Yale in 2014 as a research scientist to explore the translational aspects of lung diseases. In the past few years, she has led a variety of multicenter collaborative projects, including understanding the networks underlying lung development and transcriptional regulatory model of fibrosis progression in the human lung.

Her career focus will be the translation of the mechanistic research findings into the clinic to treat the chronic lung diseases including IPF.