United in science

A husband-and-wife team driving discovery at UTHealth Houston

On any given night, you might find Faraz Bishehsari, MD, and Mahboobeh Mahdavinia, MD, two faculty leaders at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, talking shop on their evening walk. While the couple’s fields of study may not completely overlap, they’ve found common ground and have collaborated on their work for more than 23 of their 25-year marriage.

“It’s like a research meeting every night when we go for our walks in the evening,” Mahdavinia says.

“I don’t partition my work and home. That’s me. I think that if you enjoy your work, you don’t have boundaries for work. She resonates with my work and she gives me ideas,” Bishehsari adds.

The couple arrived in Houston almost two years ago from Rush University in Chicago, both recruited to build something lasting at McGovern Medical School. Mahdavinia, the John P. and Kathrine G. McGovern Distinguished Chair, was recruited to create and lead the Division of Allergy and Immunology in the Department of Internal Medicine to new heights. Bishehsari, the Atilla Ertan, MD, Chair in Gastroenterology Research, was recruited to create the Gastroenterology Research Center, an interdisciplinary research center with the aim of conducting leading-edge translational research around the digestive tract that addresses preventive strategies, disease modification, treatment innovations, and advanced technologies.

While reluctant at first to leave their home, friends, and colleagues in Chicago, Mahdavinia and Bishehsari began to grow excited as the recruiters’ enthusiasm and dedication to UTHealth Houston began to convince them.

“Talking with the people here, their enthusiasm helped us feel we should come here because we always wanted to work somewhere that we feel connected to and love,” Mahdavinia says.

Although the couple’s specialties may not seem related to the lay person, they’ve found common ground to center their collaboration on, most notably circadian rhythms, the body’s internal clock, and the stomach.

Mahdavinia’s clinical specialty is allergy and immunology, a field she describes as a living map of inflammation. She treats both children and adults, with a particular focus on food allergies and respiratory diseases. Her research explores why some patients develop allergies and how physicians can more precisely determine when those allergies have resolved.

She is part of one of the largest National Institutes of Health-funded food allergy cohort studies in the country. Her team has identified specific blood thresholds of allergen-specific IgE that can help clinicians determine, with greater confidence, when a child has outgrown certain food allergies. The implications are practical and powerful — once it’s determined a child is no longer allergic to a certain food, it can be safely reintroduced into their diet.

At the center of much of her research is her fascination with circadian rhythm, the body’s internal clock. Sleep timing, meal timing, and immune response all potentially affect the patient. She studies how disruptions in circadian rhythm shape allergic disease outcomes, always keeping one foot in the clinic at UT Physicians Allergy and Immunology.

“I can never step out of it completely,” she says of patient care. “I wanted to make those who are not feeling well, feel well.” Mahdavinia says.

Speaking with Mahdavinia and Bishehsari you’ll quickly learn that perhaps the only thing they’re more fond of than their work is each other and their family, as the mutual respect they have permeates the conversation. 

Bishehsari’s work orbits circadian rhythm and gut microbiome. A gastroenterologist, he sees high-risk patients for gastrointestinal cancers, particularly colon and pancreatic cancer. In the lab, he has made discoveries on how environmental factors such as diet, disruption in circadian rhythm by light exposure, and meal timing interact with the microbiome and intestinal cells to influence cancer risk and aging-related diseases. He is also leading efforts at the Gastroenterology Research Center to decode tumor-specific pancreatic cancer circadian profiles toward the discovery of novel therapeutics in cancer.

An important part of his research is patient-derived models: tumor cells grown in dishes, organoids that resemble miniature organs, and even organ-on-a-chip systems that recreate aspects of the human body environment. These models allow his team to test therapies in systems that closely mimic real patients.

Recently, his group published work highlighting an organ chip model for pancreatic cancer, offering new avenues for treatment.

Along with their impressive research portfolios and significant NIH funding, both maintain their clinical practices. For Bishehsari, patient contact at the Ertan Digestive Disease Center at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center keeps the science grounded. “If I don’t see patients,” he says, “the research goes to an unexplainable land.”

For Mahdavinia, the bedside is a calling that began in childhood. “I always wanted to be a doctor,” she says. “I loved physics for example, but I always wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to help people.”

Their story together began in Iran at the University of Tehran, where a highly competitive national entrance exam placed them among the top students in the country. They met during medical school and soon found themselves working in the same digestive disease research center.

“From our earliest conversations, there was a clear spark in how we connected, one that ultimately shaped both our marriage and a long-lasting professional partnership,” Bishehsari says. “We had a lot of similarities in terms of values, family structure, and education.”

After stops at G. D’Annunzio University Chieti, in Italy, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Northwestern and Rush University in Chicago, the couple have found their way to Houston where they sensed an opportunity to build something important while continuing their collaboration.

“I think the key is that we have very complementary skills. We are not very similar, but we are complementary. And we understand each other,” Bishehsari says.

After 25 years of marriage and more than two decades of scientific collaboration, they describe themselves as lucky. In their labs, in their clinics, and at home, the conversation continues.