Rate My Professor Fariba Dehghani

Professor Fariba Dehghani is a Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney. She earned her PhD in chemical engineering from the University of New South Wales in 1997 and her Master of Engineering from the University of Shiraz, Iran. Following her PhD, she secured an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, which advanced her early career in research.

Professor Dehghani leads a multidisciplinary bioengineering research team of engineers, scientists, clinicians, and molecular biologists, focusing on nutritional food products and biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. She serves as Director of the ARC Training Centre for the Australian Food Processing Industry in the 21st Century and Director of Bioengineering Research, as well as Director of the Centre for Advanced Food Enginomics. Her research delivers cost-effective, sustainable solutions to reduce waste and develop materials for treating chronic illnesses including osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, and infections. Key innovations include phytonutrient extraction from orange peels for post-chemotherapy cancer remission products and biodegradable polymers that prolong food shelf life, replace plastics, and improve medical device safety. She is co-inventor on more than 20 worldwide patents, fostering four start-up companies from her team. With over 200 publications and more than 15,900 Google Scholar citations, prominent works include "Controlling the Porosity and Microarchitecture of Hydrogels for Tissue Engineering" (Tissue Engineering Part B: Reviews, 2010), "Electrospun Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering of Vascular Grafts" (Acta Biomaterialia, 2014), and "Biomedical Applications of Biodegradable Polyesters" (Polymers, 2016). Her achievements include the Chemical Engineering Research Excellence Award at Chemeca 2017 and the UNSW Alumni Award for Distinguished Achievement in Research in 2019.