Roxana Moslehi
Encyclopedia
Genetic epidemiology
Genetic epidemiology is the study of the role of genetic factors in determining health and disease in families and in populations, and the interplay of such genetic factors with environmental factors...
. Most of her research is dedicated to the study of cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
and cancer precursors. Born in Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
and raised in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, she is currently an assistant professor http://www.albany.edu/cancergenomics/people/moslehi.html in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the State University of New York (SUNY), where she has developed multiple courses related to genetic and molecular epidemiology and genomics-based public health and medicine. Through her research she has been contributing to the understanding of hereditary causes of diseases as well as the influence of gene-environment interactions on the risk of developing disease.
Education
Roxana received her B.Sc. with honors, M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of British ColumbiaUniversity of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...
(UBC) in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, Canada. Following her Ph.D., she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...
(NIH), Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG) under the supervision of Dr. Mitchell Gail. While being a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH, she also received an adjunct assistant professor position at George Washington University
George Washington University
The George Washington University is a private, coeducational comprehensive university located in Washington, D.C. in the United States...
(GWU), where she developed a course entitled "controversies in cancer epidemiology" with Dr. Paul Levine.
Research
Working with Drs. Steven Narod and J.M. Friedman, she was first to estimate the penetrance of BRCA1BRCA1
BRCA1 is a human caretaker gene that produces a protein called breast cancer type 1 susceptibility protein, responsible for repairing DNA. The first evidence for the existence of the gene was provided by the King laboratory at UC Berkeley in 1990...
and BRCA2
BRCA2
BRCA2 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the BRCA2 gene.BRCA2 orthologs have been identified in most mammals for which complete genome data are available....
mutations for breast
Breast cancer
Breast cancer is cancer originating from breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk. Cancers originating from ducts are known as ductal carcinomas; those originating from lobules are known as lobular carcinomas...
, ovarian
Ovarian cancer
Ovarian cancer is a cancerous growth arising from the ovary. Symptoms are frequently very subtle early on and may include: bloating, pelvic pain, difficulty eating and frequent urination, and are easily confused with other illnesses....
and other cancers in a study of Jewish women with ovarian cancer, now the most studied hereditary cancer predisposing genes in the human genome
Human genome
The human genome is the genome of Homo sapiens, which is stored on 23 chromosome pairs plus the small mitochondrial DNA. 22 of the 23 chromosomes are autosomal chromosome pairs, while the remaining pair is sex-determining...
. In 2009, Roxana proposed the possibility of positive selection for BRCA mutations and conducted the first study into the impact of mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes on female fertility as a potential mechanism influencing positive selection for BRCA mutations . She has also made significant contributions to research on modifiers of breast and ovarian cancer risk as well as research on other cancers such as Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma
The non-Hodgkin lymphomas are a diverse group of blood cancers that include any kind of lymphoma except Hodgkin's lymphomas. Types of NHL vary significantly in their severity, from indolent to very aggressive....
and on cancer precursors, such as colorectal adenoma. Most recently, Roxana developed the hypothesis of the involvement of trichothiodystrophy (TTD) genes in normal human placental development based on her novel clinical observations in TTD families.
Awards
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...
), a Biovision Fellowship from Académie des Sciences (France), two Awards for Research Excellence from the NIH, and the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2010 from School of Public Health at SUNY.