Farida Ahangari, MD

Farida Ahangari is an Assistant Professor in the Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at Yale. Her focus is to understand the pathogenesis of pulmonary fibrosis and the metabolic regulatory counterpart of this fatal disease.

Dr. Ahangari completed her M.D. at the Iran University of Medical Sciences in Tehran. She started her research training afterward in one of the world’s premier cancer groups, the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) in Australia. During this research fellowship, she learned about the role of ATM (Ataxia Telangiectasia Mutated protein) in oxidative stress and DNA damage response in cancer.

She joined Yale in 2008 as a post-doctoral fellow in Professor Jack Elias’s lab in the Pulmonary section, focusing on various animal and cellular models of lung inflammation, asthma, and fibrosis, as well as studying the link between metabolism and lung biology. She joined Professor Naftali Kaminski’s team as a faculty member in 2014 to explore the translational aspects of lung diseases and led a variety of multicenter collaborative projects, including understanding the networks underlying lung development and the transcriptional regulatory model of fibrosis progression in the human lung.

Her main research interest is to investigate the role of metabolic reprogramming in the pathogenesis of chronic lung diseases. Her carrier focus will be the translation of the mechanistic research findings into the clinic and aim to devise targeted cell-specific therapy using microRNA/noncoding RNAs to treat chronic lung diseases including IPF.