Leili Shahriyari, associate professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the UMass Cancer Center and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, has been awarded a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA, R35) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), National Institutes of Health.
The prestigious MIRA award provides long-term, flexible support for the NIGMS-relevant research program in an investigator’s laboratory. This program is designed to boost scientific productivity, increase the chances of major breakthroughs, and distribute funding more broadly among the nation’s highly talented and promising investigators.
Shahriyari’s MIRA will advance her group’s research at the interface of computational and mathematical biology, bioinformatics, and quantitative systems pharmacology, including projects that leverage single-cell datasets to uncover Tissue-Specific Pathways and Immune Responses.
Shahriyari joined UMass Amherst in 2019 (associate professor since 2023). Her group collaborates widely across campus and with biomedical partners to develop patient-specific models of cancer initiation, progression, and therapy, as well as open-source tools such as TumorDecon for digital cytometry.
For more information about Prof. Shahriyari’s research and team, visit the Shahriyari Lab.