Bijan Ferdows

Biography

Despite majoring in Molecular Biology at Pomona College, my interest in Biology developed later than most. It wasn’t until I took my first Biology class as a junior in high school that I began to appreciate the idiosyncrasies of life on earth—I’m still struck by the fact that the most complex biological systems (our brains!) are encoded by sequences of just four nucleotides. As an undergraduate, I conducted nanomedicine research at Harvard Medical School and co-authored six publications, including a medical textbook chapter in the second edition of Cancer Theragnostic.

I consider writing this chapter my first teaching experience, since it involved synthesizing extensive scientific knowledge and presenting it clearly to other scientists. In my final year at Pomona, I built on this experience as a Biochemistry TA. While I enjoyed guiding students in the lab, my favorite part was mentoring them one-on-one as they wrote the discussion sections of their lab reports. Although the life sciences are uniquely experimental, I believe an instructor’s role is to connect theoretical knowledge with experimental inquiry. This connection comes to life in the discussion section of a lab report, where experimental findings are tied back to theory.

In my free time, I enjoy playing soccer, babysitting my younger cousins, and listening to podcasts.