Thursday, September 20, 2012

Academic Research and a PhD Thesis

As the pre-scheduled  war games of allied forces began  in the Persian Gulf ,  life proceeds as usual in Tehran. My PhD student defended her thesis on Monday, in the Faculty of Basic Medical Sciences at Tarbiat Modares University. She had devoted more than 3.5 years of this degree program to her research.  Her work highlighted the immunological mechanisms involved in endometriosis. Endometriosis is a gynecological disease attributed to alterations in immune system function and also related to diet and environmental factors.  In her work she also studied the effect of Dioxin or TCDD which is a environmental pollutant on mesenchymal stem cells.  This work met the highest standards in terms of the methodology, the assays and techniques involved.
Although sanctions have targeted our economy and have made such leading edge research very difficult and expensive but this has not prevented Iranian researchers from advancing in this direction. Immunology is a rapidly advancing field and research in this field is very costly but also very rewarding in terms of the novel findings with diagnostic and therapeutic value.
Our  first article from this work was published in : The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Research  We hope to publish the next phases of this work in the future.

1 comment:

S.Shahrokhi said...

Dear Dr.Ebtekar,
Congratulation to you and Dr. Nikoo to run such a valuable research project. This is really valuable because of so many difficulties that Iranian researchers encountered in these years.