Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute of Global Health and Infectious Diseases
Farhang is a postdoctoral research associate at Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Ecology Lab (IDEEL) at the University on North Carolina Chapel Hill. He currently works on the genetic structure and diversity in Treponema pallidum, a spirochaete bacterium that causes diseases like syphilis, yaws and bejel in humans.
Farhang received his Bachelor’s in Animal Science from Isfahan University of Technology Iran followed by Master’s in Animal Science from Azad University Iran. He earned his PhD in human genetics from Monash University Australia. During his PhD he studied the genetic structure and relationships among indigenous people of Malaysia and the process of peopling of Southeast Asia and Australia. After graduation, he joined the Tropical Medicine and Biology Multidisciplinary Platform at Monash University as Research Fellow. He studied metabolic syndrome and the gut and oral microbiome in indigenous and urban Malaysians to understand the effects of urbanization on digestive system-microbial interaction. He later joined Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) as postdoctoral researcher. His work at OMRF was focused on genome-wide association, epigenetics and transcriptomics of Sjogren’s disease. Beyond his research, Farhang is broadly interested in population genetics, bioinformatics and public health.
