Afshin Beheshti

Bio

Afshin Beheshti, PhD
Professor, Department of Surgery at University of Pittsburgh
Professor, Department of Computational and Systems Biology at University of Pittsburgh
Professor, Department of Bioengineering at University of Pittsburgh
Director, Center for Space Biomedicine at Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine at University of Pittsburgh
Associate Director, McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine at University of Pittsburgh

Afshin Beheshti, PhD is Professor of Surgery, Bioengineering, and Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the Center for Space Biomedicine at the Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine and serves as Associate Director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He also holds a Visiting Scientist appointment at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research program integrates space biomedicine, mitochondrial biology, microRNA regulation, and multi-omics systems analysis to understand spaceflight-induced health risks and develop countermeasures, while translating those discoveries to Earth-bound conditions including long COVID and cancer.

Dr. Beheshti trained in physics (PhD, Florida State University, 2002) before building a career spanning Tufts University School of Medicine and NASA Ames Research Center, where he was a lead contributor to the GeneLab genomics platform and the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) project, the largest coordinated collection of space biology publications in history. He currently leads the NASA-funded Human Adaptation to Spaceflight study, a longitudinal multi-omics analysis of more than 70 astronauts across 12 years of ISS missions. He is President of COV-IRT, an international COVID-19 and long COVID research consortium he founded in 2020, and co-founder and CSO of TesaBio AI, an AI-driven drug repurposing startup. His honors include the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and the ISS Research and Development Award for Compelling Results in Biology.