Bahareh Ajami PhD

Bahareh Ajami earned her Master’s degree in Molecular Biotechnology from the University of Sydney, Australia. She subsequently obtained her Ph.D. in Experimental Medicine from the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she worked with Dr. Fabio Rossi in close collaboration with Dr. Wolfram Tetzlaff. Her thesis focused on identifying the origin of myeloid cells in neurodegenerative conditions such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and nerve damage.

During her time as a doctoral student, she was the lead author of two highly influential studies in Nature Neuroscience: in 2007, she was the first to prove that microglial cells, until then considered just another type of specialized macrophages are, in fact, a completely independent cell type with a unique origin. To date, this publication has been cited over 1000 times. Then, in 2011, she demonstrated that in neuroinflammatory diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS), the entry of peripheral blood-derived myeloid cells in the CNS not only correlates with disease progression but can also play a causative role in disease initiation.