Short Biography
Noushin Nabavi earned her B.Sc. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Toronto in 2005, graduating with co-op and cum laude distinctions. During her first co-op term at Sanofi Pasteur, she worked on developing HIV vaccine titration assays. During her second co-op term at Pharma Medica, she worked on data quality and assurance for clinical trials. She later completed her PhD in Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto in 2012.
In her doctoral research, she studied the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the differentiation of pre-osteoblastic stem cells into bone-forming cells. This work contributed to understanding bone loss in microgravity environments and supported the development of a model relevant to bone loss during space travel and in disuse-related osteoarthritic conditions.
Following graduation, she received a Siebel Stem Cell Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied molecular mechanisms of aging using animal and cellular models of disease. She later became a visiting scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, where she developed in vitro assays for drug metabolism with a leading scholar in cellular and molecular pharmacology.
She then led transcriptomics, proteomics, and genomics research at the BC Cancer Research Centre, with a focus on rare mesothelioma cancer. In this role, she assembled an international consortium of experts, wrote successful grant applications, published in peer-reviewed journals, and presented her work at local, national, and international conferences.
She later joined the civil service as a data science and science policy fellow and subsequently worked as an economist. She uses health data to support evidence-based decision making and is interested in developing reproducible and applicable algorithms and metrics to address complex policy and health-system problems. As an Iranian-Canadian, she is also interested in democracy and human rights in Iran and has expressed concerns on multiple public platforms about discrimination and restrictions on human rights, especially the rights of women in Iran. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, hiking, dancing, writing, painting, and photography.
Territorial acknowledgement: I respectfully acknowledge that I live, work, and play on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations.