Noushin Nabavi

Noushin earned her BSc in Cell and Molecular Biology in 2005 and a PhD in Cell and Systems Biology in 2011 from the University of Toronto.

Following graduation, she received a Siebel Stem Cell Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley (2012-2013) and worked on deciphering the molecular mechanisms of aging using animal and cellular models of disease. As a transitioned visiting scientist at the University of California, San Francisco (2013-2015), she developed in vitro assays for drug metabolism with a leading scholar in the field of cellular and molecular pharmacology.

Dr. Nabavi returned to Canada and led a transcriptomics, proteomics, and genomics project at the BC Cancer Research Centre on the rare mesothelioma cancer (2015-2018). For this, she assembled an international consortium of experts in the field, wrote successful grant applications, published in peer-reviewed journals, and presented her work in local, national and international conferences.

She was a Uvic/Mitacs Science Policy Fellow from 2018 to 2020 and is currently working as an Economist at the BC Ministry of Health. She has authored various scientific and policy articles as listed on her website at: http://noushinn.github.io. Her interests include evidence-informed decision making and reproducible and applicable algorithms to solve challenging and complex problems. As an Iranian-Canadian, she is also interested in democracy in Iran and has expressed her concerns about restrictions of human rights especially women in Iran.