Faramarz Valafar

Email

Primary Email: [email protected]

Building/Location

Laboratory for Pathogenesis of Clinical Drug Resistance and Persistence
6367 Alvarado Court
Suite 206
San Diego, CA 92120

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Bio

Dr. Valafar is a Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Public Health (SPH). Before joining SPH, Dr. Valafar was a Professor of Computer Science from until 2019. Before SDSU, Dr. Valafar was an Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University from 1999 until 2001.  

Dr. Valafar is a NIAID Principal Investigator leading projects on global pathogenesis and diagnosis of antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis (TB). This project involves diagnostics, prognostics, evolutionary analysis, molecular epidemiology, systems epidemiology, systems biology of TB and Drug Resistant TB (DRTB). The clinical component of the project includes diagnosis, sample collection, and treatment of TB in eight high TB burden countries from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Microbiological components of the project are conducted in the World Health Organization (WHO) Supra-National TB Reference Laboratories in Stockholm and Antwerp. All in silico components of the project (e.g. epidemiology, evolutionary, systems analysis) are conducted in San Diego.

Epidemiology, Global Health, Molecular, and Systems Biology (including Big Data Analytics) Research Opportunities

Dr. Valafar has strong collaborations with researchers and clinicians at the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Stockholm, Sweden), Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden), Institute of Tropical Medicine (Antwerp, Belgium), Stellenbosch University (Stellenbosch, South Africa), Republican Scientific and Practical Centre for Pulmonology and TB (Minsk, Belarus), National Center for TB and Lung Diseases (Tbilisi, Georgia), and Foundation for Medical Research (Mumbai, India). There are opportunities for graduate student research experiences in all aspects of the research outlined above and, in all locations, listed.

Areas of Specialization

• Infectious disease: Genomics, Epigenetics, Molecular Epidemiology, Molecular Contact Tracing
• Tuberculosis Research: Genomics, Epigenetics, Molecular diagnostics, molecular epidemiology, molecular prognostics, antibiotic resistance and persistence, systems epidemiology, mechanisms of drug resistance, systems biology, molecular contact tracing, HIV coinfection
• mHealth: mobile apps to improve health service delivery: tuberculosis diagnostics and prognostics, onsite sample sequencing and analysis, cloud-based diagnostics, distributed health record systems, global cloud-based data storage, retrieval, and analytics from point of care
• Data Science and Machine Learning: big-data analytics, deep learning, artificial neural networks, stochastic pattern recognition