Rate My Professor Mohammad Arefian

Dr. Mohammad Arefian is a Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at The Queen's University Belfast. He earned his Ph.D. from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, in 2018, focusing on the effects of salinity stress on plants through analyses of physiological responses, gene expression, and proteome changes within the Plant Biotechnology Department. Following his doctorate, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yenepoya Research Centre in India, where his research examined kinase-mediated signaling pathways in rice and Arabidopsis under stress conditions and during flowering. This work utilized proteomic, proteogenomic, and metabolomic approaches to study stress-responsive mechanisms in model plants, alongside explorations of post-translational modifications, cancers, and infectious diseases in humans.

Since 2023, Dr. Arefian has served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Collins Lab at Queen's University Belfast, advancing proteomics methodologies and applications to infectious diseases. He co-authored the paper 'A gas phase fractionation acquisition scheme integrating ion mobility for rapid diaPASEF library generation,' published in Proteomics (2023), which has received 16 citations per Scopus and involves collaborators Gunnar N. Schroeder, José A. Bengoechea, and Ben C. Collins. Another key publication is 'Inflammation and B cell activation define a plasma proteome signature predicting tuberculosis in people with HIV,' published in mBio (2025), contributing to data curation, analysis, methodology, software, visualization, and review, in collaboration with the Swiss HIV Cohort Study. As co-investigator on the project 'Can circulating inflammatory mediators predict active tuberculosis in HIV+ patients?' (initiated February 2023), his expertise bridges plant biology and human disease proteomics, emphasizing biomarker discovery and mass spectrometry innovations.