Maha Farhat holds an MD from the McGill University Faculty of Medicine and a MSc in biostatistics from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. She is also a practicing physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.
Dr. Farhat's research focuses on the development and application of methods for associating genotype and phenotype in infectious disease pathogens, with a strong emphasis on translation to better diagnostics and surveillance in resource-poor settings. To date, Farhat's work has focused on the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis and spans the spectrum from computational analysis to field studies. She is PI and Co-Investigator on several large projects funded by NIH, including the NIAID and the BD2K initiative.
Current research projects:
- Temporal Phenotypes and Risk Models for the Post-COVID Syndrome and its sub-types. Massachusetts General Hospital.
The goal is to develop clinical and computational algorithms for post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) phenotypes. We will develop cohort identification and risk models of PASC phenotypes, accounting for temporal ordering and progression of evolving phenotypes over time. We will evaluate the generalizability and bias of the PASC models and develop a reliable framework for cohort identification and risk modelling of temporal phenotypes that may evolve over time and/or be difficult to define clinically with EHR data.
- NIH/NIAID R01. An RNA nanosensor to diagnose antibiotic resistance in M. tuberculosis
Goal: The early development of novel transcriptomic-based test for 5 TB antibiotics.
- UNITAID Seq2Treat
To operationalize sequencing for TB drug resistance diagnosis and provide analysis support to create the World Health Organization drug resistance database.
- Machine learning to predict compound inhibitory activity against Borrelia burgdorferi.
Philanthropic Gift in Collaboration with the Hu and Aldridge Labs at Tufts Medical School.
Email: Maha_Farhat [at] hms.harvard.edu
