Motivation letter of Marziyeh Khavari

One of the proudest accomplishments of my life was earning my college degree, although my early adulthood pointed in the opposite direction, beginning some discrimination in education, civil rights, work in Iran’s environment for the Afgan Immigrant. Over the past decades, my family migrated from Afghanistan to Iran since the lack of security and civil war. I grew up in Iran with complicated conditions that were sometimes challenging for me living in these circumstances. Because of my absolute commitment and determination toward obtaining education for my professional future, I start a private business by myself that enabled me to make money while supporting myself financially.
To begin, I entered the Karaj college of agriculture in 2011 as an associate degree in plant product technology. For my associate internship in the organic farm production Mirjalili, I worked on not only mechanized transplantation production but also medical plants in a greenhouse, which allowed me to strengthen my skills in organic production. Then, I interested in medicinal plants because I believe this field would give me perspective in my country to the identification and development of these plants. I graduated my Bachelor’s degree in Production and Utilization of medicinal and aromatic plants in Arak University in 2013. As an intern for my bachelor, I worked on optimizing the protocols and the propagation of fruit trees, forest trees, and medicinal plants in a cell and tissue culture firm.
For graduate study, I decided to pursue my education at the University of Tehran, which is the top-ranking university in Iran especially in the field of horticulture. My master thesis guided under Dr. Reza Fatahi titled ‘Effect of nitric oxide, salicylic acid, and kaolin compounds on vegetative, reproductive and biosynthesis of taxol metabolite in hazelnut (Corylus avellana)’. Also, I worked on six commercial hazelnuts to detect tolerant and productive hazelnut with some supportive material such as Salicylic acid, Kaolin, Nitric oxide. Recently I submitted part of the result of my research on the Scientific Reports Journal.
Beyond my proposal thesis, one of my innovatory ideas is to draw the relationship between annual productivity and climate parameters. The stability of six cultivars during 2011-2018 through combined linear regression and neural fuzzy network analysis were performed for modeling hazelnut production considering Karaj climate change parameters. I am going to submit the results of this research in the article until next month.
As time goes, I become interested in computational biology and bioinformatics. People have often said that I am intelligent in computer statistics and related software. I have been very fortunate to work and learn with an incredible group of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows particularly the research team of Dr. Mohamad Reza Naghavi in bioinformatics. That developed my knowledge regarding genomics and discovery or prediction of the regulatory sequence of transcription factor (TF) genes, marker (SSR and SNP ) from RNA-seq data. I extended my research by prediction and identification of some transcription factors, genes, microRNA and other non-coding RNA (ceRNA, circRNA, lncRNA) in the pathway that regulator abiotic stress (heat stress) and secondary metabolic (Taxol) using genome-wide statistical analysis. I will complete our draft and write an article as soon as possible.
During studying for master, I took the additional course with Dr. Houshang Alizadeh, who is one of the best scientists in the field of genetic engineering in Iran. I believe that this course gives me more insight into how this knowledge helps my research. I have done my final assignment at this course entitled ‘application of CRISPR cas 9 to increase of secondary metabolite) Taxol in hazelnut cell culture’ and obtained the best grade compared to my peers. I want to perform this technique in my thesis because of simple, cost-effective, and efficient for targeted genome editing, but I could not due to lack of equipment and grant since the economic sanction of Iran.
Recently I am working for CellKGP firm (Implement the Laboratory Services) as data and computational biology analyzer. This job provided an environment in which this is very important to intellectual development and coincides perfectly with my interests.
Ultimately, I feel that my life experiences would be an asset to Cornell’s MPS program in horticulture. Cornell has an exciting interdisciplinary program that is exceptionally impressive, which will allow me to focus on different accept of crop science such as plant breeding, bioinformatics, genetic engineering for my professional career. In particular, Dr. Lawrence smart’s specialty in hemp science complements my own interest in studying the experiences of metabolite pathway and bioinformatics. A future career goal of mine is to work in partnership with developing countries, especially in the Afghanistan economy in the marketing of horticulture products, which is achievable by enhancement of knowledge in plant breeding in the scientific field. I am confident that the initiative, problem-solving skills, and energy I have shown in the past have prepared me intellectually and emotionally for graduate school at Cornell University. I am eager to begin the process by my commitment to research. It is my goal to become highly skilled and to contribute real value to the projects.
Thank you for considering my application
Sincerely