I was born in Tehran in 1985, and like most kids there in the 90s, I grew up obsessed with football and video games, starting on an Atari, then a Sega, then a PlayStation. But underneath the games and the football matches, I was always the kid asking why things worked the way they did. That curiosity found its real outlet at 15, when I discovered programming through QBasic. It felt like a revelation. I knew almost immediately that I wanted to become a computer scientist.
I went on to study computer science, algorithms, and theoretical computer science for my bachelor's and master's degrees in Tehran. Somewhat to my own surprise, my most-cited academic paper came out of research I did independently during my master's: an algorithm for detecting motifs, recurring patterns, inside large-scale networks. That work pulled me toward a bigger question: could the same mathematical thinking that finds patterns in abstract networks help explain biology, genomics, even the meaning of life itself? That question is what took me to Basel in 2010 for my PhD in Bioinformatics, and later to EPFL in Lausanne for my postdoc.
After my postdoc, I joined Sophia Genetics as a bioinformatics expert and data scientist, helping build cancer diagnostic tests used around the world. That work meant something to me personally. I'd lost a person very close to me to cancer, and knowing that the algorithms I was building might help someone else's family avoid that same loss made the work feel less like a job and more like a purpose.
In 2020, I made a deliberate choice to apply the same rigor to a completely different world: marketing and commercial analytics. I joined Electronic Arts as a data scientist and built the company's first in-house marketing mix modeling system. Over the next few years I moved into management, growing a team from just myself to five data scientists, working across marketing, branding, publishing, and customer service, and managing 10 to 15 projects at any given time. In parallel, I co-founded ELIYA, an analytics and marketing science advisory based in Zurich. ELIYA's mission is to enable e-commerce and retail marketers with best in-class marketing measurement capabilities. ELIYA supports $50 million in media budget.
What connects all of it, cancer genomics, gaming analytics, business venture, is the same thing that pulled me toward programming at 15: a fascination with finding the pattern underneath the noise, and an even bigger satisfaction in explaining it simply enough that someone without a technical background can act on it with confidence. I've spent a lot of my career in public-facing roles, breaking down complex ideas for people who don't have the time or background to dig into the algorithm themselves, and I think that's the thing that actually sets me apart: not just doing the technical work, but being the bridge between it and the people who have to make decisions because of it.
