Kahkeshan Hijazi

B.S. Bioinformatics, Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad, Pakistan, 2006

Lab: http://www.bumc.bu.edu/compbiomed/

Advisor: Avrum Spira

Research

Kahkeshan works in the Computational Biomedicine Section at the BU School of Medicine. Tobacco-exposure causes changes in gene-expression throughout lungs and respiratory tract .We hypothesize that exposure to tobacco smoke creates a “field of injury” in epithelial cells throughout the respiratory tract and that gene expression in the lungs and nasal epithelium of a smoker reflects the host response to that toxin. The long-term goal of my research is to develop predictors of tobacco-induced airway epithelial cell damage and the risk for having or developing tobacco-associated lung disease. Extending the field of injury concept, I also focus on the use of molecular profiling to study gene expression alte rations associated with premalignancy in tobacco-associated lung diseases.