Poorya Foroutan Pajoohian completed a BSc in health sciences in 2016, MSc in immunology in 2019 and published two papers in the Journal of Inflammation Research and Advanced Biomedical Research from her MSc thesis which was a study of CXCR2 chemical receptor expression in the animal model of acute ulcerative colitis (UC). They showed that CXCR2 is the only receptor for the CXCL family of chemicals that showed increased expression in UC experiments and that CXCR2 could play an important role in the pathogenesis of the disease.

Poorya worked as a researcher in various laboratories and has extensive experience in the methods used in clinical research services. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Poorya was a doctoral student at the University of Iceland, Dr. Eirik Steingrímsson, who is a researcher in melanoma, and was running at least 500 PCR samples per day in the hospital. Poorya wanted to study further and applied for a doctoral position here in Iceland, which he got.

Poorya began his PhD studies at the University of Iceland under the guidance of Professor Ingileifur Jónsdóttir and Dean Stefanía P. Bjarnarson and is currently working at the Department of Immunology at Landspítali University Hospital. He is a board member of the Center for Life Sciences as a representative of PhD students. He is currently working on ways to overcome limited vaccine response and protect against respiratory infections. Recently, a group of researchers published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Frontiers in Immunology, where Poorya is the third author, and they demonstrated that the adjuvants dmLT and mmCT increase both the stimulation and sustained immune response of newborns to the vaccine Pn1-CRM197 after immunisation in the mucosa or in the gastrointestinal tract. Poorya has also lectured and presented posters with results from his research at national and international conferences.

Poorya Foroutan Pajoohian was born in 1993 in Kurdistan, east Iran, and has a newborn son named Kardo.