Dr Ghafourian is a Pharm.D. and has a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences (1997), with a research focus on drug design and discovery. Her work includes the prediction of pharmacological and toxicological properties of drug candidates. She uses in vitro methods such as mitochondrial respiration, and computer-based modelling, including machine learning and molecular modelling for molecular medicine as well as drug delivery experimentations. She is an associate professor of Pharmacology at the B&J Silverman College of Pharmacy, NSU. She is also the Editor of Springer’s Molecular Diversity. Before joining NSU, she held faculty positions at various prestigious universities in the United Kingdom since 2001, including the University of Kent (11 years), the University of Sussex (5 years), and the University of Bedfordshire (2 years). With She has many scientific publications including 95 research papers and book chapters, and supervised many PhD and Pharm.D. students and led various research projects.
Statistical Interests:
In computer-based drug discovery, we rely heavily on statistical analysis, especially within Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSAR) which is my specialty. QSAR finds patterns and correlations between a biological effect of a set of compounds (e.g. antidepressant effect, liver toxicity,..) and their molecular properties (e.g. weight, number of specific atoms, dipole moment, molecular fingerprints). I apply statistical methods in the context of cheminformatics and bioinformatics, as well as brain image data (for Alzheimer's disease).
Statistical Methods:
I use supervised ML methods of classification and regression types, including regression, logistic regression, multivariate regression, decision trees, random forest, SVM, and some neural networks. I use feature selection methods, multilabel classification.
