Aryana Shirzada

Aryana Shirzada is a medical doctor and PhD candidate at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in The Netherlands. She obtained her medical degree at the LUMC, and subsequently worked in the outpatient clinic of a hospital’s ophthalmology department. After a year working in the clinic, she switched to a fulltime research position.

Her PhD research focuses on patients diagnosed with a rare intra-ocular malignancy, commonly referred to as eye melanoma. In her research she focusses on the psychosocial aspects of the disease and it’s treatment, with an emphasis on patient-physician communication, patient preferences in the treatment decision-making, and quality of life before and after treatment. 

As part of her research she and her colleagues developed a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to understand and quantify the trade-offs that patients with eye melanoma are willing to make regarding potential characteristics and outcomes of proton beam therapy. For this, a DCE was developed wherein patients with eye melanoma were asked to make trade-offs between current and hypothetical future PBT treatment outcomes. Through this work she aims to further optimize the treatment with proton beam therapy for patients diagnosed with eye melanoma. Following the completion of her PhD research, Aryana intends to combine both research and clinical practice.