- Professor, Department of Genetics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Golnaz Vahedi is a Professor of Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Co-Director of the Penn Epigenetics Institute, and Deputy Director of the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health. She received her BS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and Texas A&M University, respectively, transitioning into computational and molecular immunology during her postdoctoral training.
The Vahedi laboratory studies the epigenetic and three-dimensional genome organization underlying T cell fate decisions, with seminal contributions to understanding TCF-1, T cell exhaustion, and the 3D chromatin architecture of autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes. Her group integrates single-cell multi-omics, spatial profiling, and machine learning to discover early molecular signatures of disease and to define how genetic risk variants exert their effects through regulatory chromatin states.
As Co-Director of the Penn Epigenetics Institute and a senior leader of I3H, Dr. Vahedi anchors Penn’s strengths in functional genomics applied to autoimmune disease. She is an active member of the Penn Colton Center, partnering across Penn and the broader Colton Consortium on programs that leverage single-cell and chromatin biology to enable earlier detection and precision intervention in type 1 diabetes and other immune-mediated diseases.