Kiavash Movahedi

Prof. Kiavash Movahedi is a full-time professor at the VUB, where he heads the Brain and Systems Immunology lab associated with the Brussels Center for Immunology. The Movahedi lab focuses on brain immunology and aims to understand how neuro-immune crosstalk shapes the healthy and diseased brain. The lab is particularly interested in brain macrophages, like microglia, and works on developing therapies for neurodegenerative disorders and cancer by modulating or enhancing macrophages and neuroinflammatory responses. In this regard, Prof. Movahedi was recently awarded an ERC consolidator grant focused on microglia engineering and replacement strategies. Prof. Movahedi graduated as a bioengineer and obtained his PhD in bioscience engineering at the University of Brussels in 2010, supported by an aspirant fellowship from FWO. As an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, he then undertook postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Germany. In 2015, he returned to Belgium and started his independent research unit at the VUB. In 2020, he became a Collen-Francqui research professor at the Brussels Health Campus and was promoted to associate professor in 2023.