Niaz Banaei received his medical education from Stanford University. During medical school he developed a passion for infectious diseases diagnostics while conducting diagnostic research on Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Mexico and South Africa. After medical school he completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at the University of California, San Francisco. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in tuberculosis pathogenesis at the New York University. He then moved back to Stanford University to join the department of Pathology and serve as Medical Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at Stanford Health Care.
He is currently a Professor of Pathology and Medicine (Division of Infectious Diseases & Geographic Medicine) at Stanford University and is the Director of Stanford Clinical Microbiology Fellowship and Stanford Global Health Diagnostics Fellowship. He is also the associate program director for Clinical Pathology training program.
His research interests include
(1) development, assessment, improvement, clinical impact of novel infectious diseases diagnostics and
(2) immunopathogenesis of M. tuberculosis.
He was the recipient of several teaching awards. He has authored over 170 scientific articles and holds a number of invention patents.His research interests include (1) development, assessment, and improvement of novel infectious diseases diagnostics, (2) enhancing the quality of C. difficile diagnostic results, and (3) characterization of M. tuberculosis virulence determinants.
Micro Lecture