Niaz Banaei received his medical education from Stanford University. During medical school he developed a passion for infectious diseases diagnostics while conducting diagnostic research on Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Mexico and South Africa. After medical school he completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at the University of California, San Francisco. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in tuberculosis pathogenesis at the New York University. He then moved back to Stanford University to join the department of Pathology and serve as Medical Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at Stanford Health Care. He is currently a Professor of Pathology and Medicine (Division of Infectious Diseases & Geographic Medicine) at Stanford University and is the Director of Stanford Clinical Microbiology Fellowship and Stanford Global Health Diagnostics Fellowship. He is also the associate program director for Clinical Pathology training program. His research interests include (1) development, assessment, improvement, clinical impact of novel infectious diseases diagnostics and (2) immunopathogenesis of M. tuberculosis. He was the recipient of several teaching awards. He has authored over 170 scientific articles and holds a number of invention patents.

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Matt Hernandez received his MD/PhD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) in New York City. His graduate work focused on viral-host interactions and tracing HIV evolution in vivo using genomic tools. During his training, he applied his skills to the clinical laboratory and helped found the ISMMS Personalized Virology Initiative. Through this, he developed genomic surveillance programs to capture spread, and evolution of respiratory viruses and established innovative testing to meet SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic needs for New Yorkers early in the COVID-19 pandemic. After medical school, he completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at ISMMS. During this, he continued to foster his passions for pathogen evolution and used diagnostics to characterize real-time introductions and spread of SARS-CoV-2 in New York and South America as well as helped bring on Mpox diagnostic assays to tackle the global outbreak. After residency, he completed his medical microbiology fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA. He then moved west to join the Department of Pathology at Stanford where he serves as the Associate Director of the Clinical Microbiology and Virology Laboratories. His research interests include exploiting genomics to (1) dissect inter- and intra-host pathogen diversity, (2) to shed light on mechanisms shaping pathogen evolution and drug-resistance development, and (3) to develop novel, optimized diagnostics to capture emergent pathogens. He also loves teaching and strives to open the door to others interested in infectious disease diagnostics and research.

Stanford Profile