Niaz Banaei received his medical education from Stanford University. During medical school he developed a passion for infectious diseases diagnostics while conducting diagnostic research on Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Mexico and South Africa. After medical school he completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at the University of California, San Francisco. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in tuberculosis pathogenesis at the New York University. He then moved back to Stanford University to join the department of Pathology and serve as Medical Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at Stanford Health Care. He is currently a Professor of Pathology and Medicine (Division of Infectious Diseases & Geographic Medicine) at Stanford University. He has authored over 200 scientific articles and holds a number of invention patents.