Milken Institute School of Public Health welcomes Gholamali (Ali) Rahnavard as an assistant professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics. Rahnavard joins the school from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, where he was a senior computational scientist with the institute’s Metabolomics Platform.
Rahnavard studies the intersection of microbiome and metabolome to understand their interactions in health and disease. The Rahnavard Lab uses computational methods to research the underlying processes involved in disease activity and to investigate how the microbes in the human gut and metabolites interact during health and disease.
Rahnavard earned his Ph.D. in computer science, applied statistics, and bioinformatics at New Mexico State University. He completed postdoctoral work in the biostatistics department at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program at the Broad Institute. He holds a master’s degree in computer engineering/software systems from Shiraz University in Iran and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Razi University of Kermanshah in Iran.