Dr. Nafeli was born in Iran, and moved to Rome, Italy at age 19 to pursue a medical education. Driven by his keen interest in the study of the aging brain and neurodegeneration, in his last year of medical school, he was sent to the University of Maryland, Baltimore, as a research scholar, where he completed his M.D.  graduation thesis about Alzheimer’s Disease. A few months after graduating summa cum laude from Tor Vergata University of Rome, he joined the Neurology Department at the University of Miami as a postdoctoral research scholar. He is in the postdoctoral T32 mentored research training program: Cross–Disciplinary Research Opportunity for Training in AD/ADRD Science: CrossROADS. Under the leadership of Dr. Tatjana Rundek, he is researching Vascular Contributions to Cognitive Impairment and Dementia (VCID), investigating how compromise in cardiovascular system mechanisms and blood abnormalities may contribute to the development of diseases that cause cognitive decline.