Azerbaijani scholar Ayaz Najafov has been appointed Assistant Professor at University of Texas (UT).
Ayaz joined the university’s Southwestern Medical Center in June to be involved in a cancer-related study in which he will involve postdocs and research associates.
He will research the role of necroptosis in anti-tumor immunity and cancer, and how the immunogenicity of necroptosis can be harnessed to enhance cancer immunotherapies.
Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, Ayaz was a PhD student in Dario Alessi’s laboratory at University of Dundee from 2008 to 2013 where he worked on the signaling mechanisms of a programmed necrosis pathway called necroptosis.
Together with his brother, Ayaz also developed a bioinformatics software for interaction proteomics data analysis and won the Innovator of the Year 2012 Award.
After joining Junying Yuan for his postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School, Ayaz started to work on the signaling mechanisms of a programmed necrosis pathway called necroptosis and made a number of breakthroughs in cancer study.
