In Stride

I am coming from physical therapy background with highest GPA among my peers. From the time I started my studies in physical therapy, I become very much interested in anatomy discipline. I started teaching anatomy courses since the time I was a graduate student of anatomy. I strongly believe that having a solid base of anatomy knowledge would tremendously lead to the success of medical professionals including podiatrists. In my anatomy teaching the emphasis is to learn anatomy through cadaveric dissection. By the time podiatry students finish their lower extremity anatomy they should master dissection techniques and efficiently could find all detailed anatomy of the foot.

I had offers from other universities, but I have chosen Barry University School of Podiatric Medicine because I liked its friendly environment and the mission of the school to train highly qualified podiatrists. As a human anatomist I am very much happy to contribute to the mission of BUSPM and my advice for the students would be to take anatomy courses very seriously as these courses are the foundation of Medicine.

Besides teaching anatomy courses, I have extensive research experience in regenerative medicine and stem cells and would like to establish research studies related to the field of Podiatric Medicine especially for would care.

Dr. Hassan Azari obtained his Physical Therapy degree from Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (one of the top rank medical universities in the middle east), Shiraz, Iran. He went on to earn a master of Anatomical Sciences from Tarbiat Modarres University, Iran and, then completed his Ph.D. in Anatomical Sciences from Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Iran, in collaboration with the University of Queensland, Australia, in 2007. After completing post-doctoral research in neural stem cell and regenerative neuroscience at the McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida, he joined the University of Florida Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program as a research scientist in 2014. Dr. Azari became Associate Professor of Anatomical Sciences at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in 2016. He rejoined the University of Florida College of Medicine as a Research Assistant Professor in 2018. In January 2022, he joined faculty in the School of Podiatric Medicine at Barry University, Miami Shores, Florida as Associate Professor in Anatomy.

Dr. Azari has taught different gross anatomy courses for medical and allied health science students in the past 15 years. He mentored many graduate (master and Ph.D.) students in biomedical sciences. Dr. Azari’s research is focused on neural stem cell biology and technology, neural cell transplantation in neurological diseases, dendritic cell-based vaccine immunotherapy and dietary interventions in treating brain tumors, studying natural products, cannabinoids, and extracellular vesicles for the treatment of brain tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. He is also interested in anatomy education research and anatomical variations. Dr. Azari is on the review board of several biomedical journals and published many original and review papers as well as book chapters.