Dr. Mana Parast is a physician-scientist with clinical and research expertise in placental development and pathology. She is the Director of the Perinatal Pathology Service and Co-Director of the Center for Perinatal Discovery at UC San Diego. She is also a member of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program as well as the Institute of Engineering in Medicine.
Dr. Parast received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the prestigious Medical Scientist Training Program fellowship. She did her residency training in Anatomic Pathology at Emory University Hospital, followed by fellowship training in Women’s and Perinatal Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in affiliation with Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Following her clinical training, she combined subspecialty sign-out with laboratory research at Brigham’s Center for Excellence in Vascular Biology, initially as a Fellow and later as an Instructor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Parast established her independent research program at UC San Diego in 2008, where her work has been continuously funded through grants from both the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).