Afrooz Afghani

Afrooz Afghani, PhD, MPH, completed her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences at UC Irvine and her master’s degree in Public Health at UCLA. She then earned her PhD in a highly competitive five-year program of Biokinesiology at USC, where she also completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Epidemiology at the Keck School of Medicine.

Dr Afghani has been actively involved in several NIH-funded research projects with interest in the factors that influence bone acquisition, maintenance, and loss in healthy or diseased children, adults, and the elderly of multi-ethnicities. She has collaborated with researchers and clinicians at USC, investigating factors influencing bone mass of overweight, obese, and children with type 2 diabetes. Also, with investigators at UCSD, Dr. Afghani has worked on the osteoporosis component of the Rancho Bernardo Study, first established in 1972 that includes epidemiological follow-up studies of more than 1000 postmenopausal women and elderly men.

Dr. Afghani has first-authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in top-ranked medical journals, including the American Journal of Hypertension, Diabetes Care, Calcified Tissue International, Hormone Research, Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, and Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. She has been an invited contributor of several book chapters and the editor of two books. In addition, she is on the honorary Editorial Board of Clinical Medicine: Pediatrics and The Open Obesity Journal, and is an editorial reviewer for more than 15 different peer-reviewed scientific journals. She is a grant reviewer for the non-profit pediatric funding agency, the Thrasher Research Fund.   Dr. Afghani has made numerous presentations at national and international meetings of professional organizations, including the American College of Sports Medicine, the American Society for Bone & Mineral Research, the International Osteoporosis Foundation, the European Obesity Society, and the European Calcified Tissue Society.

In the last 15 years, Dr. Afghani has taught in the areas of physiology, pathology, nutrition and exercise epidemiology, statistics and research methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels in both classroom (UCLA and USC) and online (George Washington University and Simmons College) settings. She has mentored graduate students in all phases of their doctoral programs, has served on PhD dissertation committees, has been a member of university Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), and has contributed to various other university-wide committees.