Melis Anahtar, MD, PhD

Melis Anahtar, MD, PhD has over a decade of experience in the medical and research fields. Melis began their career in 2002 as a High School Student Summer Researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, where they designed, fabricated, and tested a microfluidic device that isolates a 99% pure leukocyte population from whole blood. In 2005, they began working as an Undergraduate Student Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an Undergraduate Student Summer Intern at the National Institutes of Health. At MIT, they also worked as a Blogger in the Admissions Office. In 2006, they were a Summer Research Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where they examined the trapping abilities of different types of nanowires and then arranged them using optical tweezers to create junctions and arrays. In 2007, they began their MSc Student Researcher role at the University of Oxford, where they investigated a possible mechanism of neutrophil trafficking into lymphatic vessels. In 2011, they were a Harvard Immunology, PhD at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, where they sought to determine how genital bacteria and injectable hormonal contraceptives influence the permissiveness of the genital mucosa to HIV. In 2016, they Co-Founded Day Zero Diagnostics, Inc, where they are developing a rapid diagnostic using next-generation genome sequencing technologies and proprietary data-driven algorithms to rapidly identify bacterial species and predict drug resistance directly from clinical samples. Since 2017, they have held three roles at Massachusetts General Hospital: T32 Research Fellow, Medical Resident in Clinical Pathology, and Medical Microbiology Fellow.

Melis Anahtar, MD, PhD obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2004 to 2008. Melis then went on to obtain a Master of Science degree in Integrated Immunology from the University of Oxford from 2008 to 2009. Melis then attended Harvard Medical School from 2009 to 2017, where they obtained a Doctor of Medicine degree. During their time at Harvard Medical School, they also obtained a PhD in Immunology from Harvard University from 2011 to 2015.