Maziar Ashrafian Bonab

After completing a postgraduate course in Forensic Medicine at the Iranian Legal Medical Organization (1992), he worked as the head of Hormozgan Province Legal Medical Centre (Iran) for four years (1992–1996).

As well as dealing with many different forensic cases and having done more than 400 autopsies, he taught forensic medicine and medical anthropology to the undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes within the Bandar-Abbas University of Medical Sciences and Bandar-Abbas Islamic Azad University.

From 1996 to 2002, he worked as an academic member of the Iranian Archaeological Research Centre at the Cultural Heritage Organization of Iran (ICHO) - and as a forensic anthropologist, he participated in seventeen archaeological excavations around Iran.

In 2003 he completed an MSc degree in Archaeology (2002–2003) at the Department of Biomolecular Sciences; University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and in October 2003, he started a PhD in the field of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.

In his current research, he is using genetic tools to investigate the maternal and paternal history of the Iranian ethnic groups and also the emergence of the first farmers in the Iranian Plateau (eastern parts of the Fertile Crescent) and the origin of Aryans (Indo-Iranians) and Indo-Aryan race theory.