CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF

LEELA GHAFFARI

03/21/1956 – 07/28/2026

It is with heavy hearts, but minds full of beautiful memories, that we share the news that our beloved wife and mother, Leela Ghaffari, passed away on Tuesday in New York City. She fought against her cancer until the very last minute with the fierce strength and grace that defined her entire life, until her body could carry her no further.

As we try to navigate a world without her, we wanted to reach out to the army of well-wishers across the world who pulled for her, prayed for her, and helped us fight for her life until the very end.

Leela was truly one of a kind. Born in Arak, Iran in 1956, she came to the United States as a high school student in 1974. In keeping with the understanding in her hometown that the largest universities were the best, she took the bold leap of driving herself all the way from Connecticut to Columbus, OH to attend Ohio State University, graduating in 1979. After earning her BS in Food Technology, she took a sales job with a pharmaceutical company, driving door-to-door to doctors’ offices across her territory throughout the day and into the evening a feat of independence and grit for a young woman in the 1970s.

Leela was uniquely gifted with her hands – in painting, sewing, and home repairs; she was the family’s resident handywoman, never once bringing in outside help when she could figure it out herself. That same precision found its calling in dentistry, a path that traced all the way back to Arak, where as a child she watched the town’s dentist — a woman — save her father’s life after his first heart attack. She went on to become a hygienist before ultimately earning her Doctor of Dental Medicine from Tufts University in Boston.

It was in Boston in the late 1980s that Shaygan and Leela met and married. From there, her fierce entrepreneurial spirit shone. Driven by a vision to build something of her own, she founded, designed, and established two thriving dental practices entirely from the ground up: one in Chestnut Hill and another in Boston’s historic North End. She navigated the challenges of business ownership, from practice management to patient care, with acumen and empathy. She wasn’t just an exceptional clinician; she was a natural entrepreneur whose warmth turned patients into lifelong friends. True to her immigrant work ethic, when she gave birth to us — Tara and Shaya — in the early 1990s, she returned to work just days later. She masterfully multiplexed being a mother, a homemaker, a remarkable dentist, and a business owner without missing a beat.

Over the years, as Shaygan’s career took our family from city to city, Leela selflessly sacrificed her private practices to keep us together. Yet, her passion for her craft never dimmed. She conquered board exams and recertifications in every new city and country we moved to, going on to teach dentistry at institutions including Tufts, NYU, King’s College in London, and the University of California in San Francisco. She was beloved by her students across the globe. An intellectually humble, lifelong learner herself, she even returned to university in her mid-fifties to get a Masters degree in Biomaterial Sciences from NYU while she was still teaching dentistry. Beyond her clinics and classrooms, Leela’s heart belonged to service. She had a profound sense of human dignity and was deeply committed to providing top-of-the-line care to those who needed it most, volunteering her skills across the US and around the world. In the US, sheserved underserved and uninsured communities through free pop-up clinics with Remote Area Medical (RAM) units and community clinics in New York City and East Palo Alto. Overseas, her compassion extended to mission trips in Iran, traveling into remote villages overflowing with orphans and refugees to treat needy families and children. Whether living out of trailers in distant regions or treating patients on makeshift dental chairs, she brought dignity, comfort, and relief to people who otherwise had nowhere else to turn.

Leela’s Iranian heritage was not just where she was from, but who she was — she carried that ingrained resilience with her always. An avid student of world history, she possessed an extraordinarily sharp mind to match. She had a rare, intuitive perception about human nature and the complexities of this world. Shaygan recalls working with the CEO of a Fortune 50 company who came to hold Leela’s judgment in such high regard that he would ask, “What” would Leela do in this situation?” Shaygan would ask her, bring back her answer, and the CEO would invariably say, “she nailed it again”.

She was also wonderfully feisty and never hesitated to hold her ground. Just ask any one of Tara and Shaya’s many friends, who were never allowed to have them sleepover as children. Her chief complaint about Shaygan throughout their 36 years of marriage was that he always walked exactly one step in front of her. No matter how many times he tried to logically explain that it was simply a matter of differences in their stride length, his physics-based excuses were to no avail. To Leela, it was the principle of the matter! Leela was a true force of nature, as exemplified by her most courageous fight with cancer over a grueling four years. In these final months especially, she showed us the extreme measure of her resilience, leaving this world surrounded by an incredible global community of supporters who did whatever they could to save her.

We are forever grateful to her primary medical team at Memorial Sloan Kettering — Dr. Pedram Razavi (Oncologist & the Director of the Breast Cancer Translational Program & Molecular Tumor Board) and Dr. Amy Xu (Breast Radiation Oncologist & Director of Metastatic Research Program) — who guided her care with immense skill and devotion. We also extend our profound thanks to the team of nurses along the way, the ER teams at Memorial Sloan Kettering and Mount Sinai West, and to our supporting advisors: Dr. Mehra Golshan of Yale, Dr. Tess O’Meara of Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Leela’s nephew Dr. Omid Farokhzad (CEO of Seer Inc. and former Harvard Medical School Professor). And finally, we would be remiss to not acknowledge the cutting-edge AI clinical tools OpenEvidence and Gemini, which helped us explore every possible medical and supportive care angle in her fight. To all of you who rolled up your sleeves and supported us from New York, Boston, Silicon Valley, Ohio, Florida … to Iran, London, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, and beyond: we are eternally, boundlessly grateful. Your efforts, kindness, and love gave us strength when we needed it most.

We will share details regarding a service to honor and celebrate Leela’s life in the coming days. For now, please hold Leela in your hearts, remember her warmth, her sharp intellect, and her boundless, feisty spirit.