Leila Pirhaji

Leila Pirhaji is the founder and CEO of ReviveMed. Leila has a background in molecular biology and computational biology, and has worked as a research scientist for both academia and industry.

Pirhaji started their career as a visiting scientist at ETH Zurich, developing an algorithm to infer protein-protein interaction networks from high-throughput quantitative mass spectrometry data. Leila then moved to the University of Tehran as a Masters Research Assistant before coming to the United States to pursue their PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, they worked on developing a pipeline for upstream and downstream analysis of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data of cancer patients treated with a drug to identify biomarkers associated with the drug response.

After completing their PhD, Pirhaji worked as a postdoctoral research associate at MIT, where they continued to work on projects related to cancer genomics and precision medicine. In 2014, they did a short internship at Merck, working on molecular stratification of pan-cancer tumors using transcriptional and mutational data. The following year, they did another internship at Takeda Oncology, working on developing a pipeline for upstream and downstream analysis of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data of cancer patients treated with a drug to identify biomarkers associated with the drug response.

In 2016, Pirhaji founded ReviveMed, a precision medicine company that uses machine learning to analyze metabolomics data to develop new therapeutic targets and predict drug response.

Leila Pirhaji received their Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.) in Biotechnology from the University of Tehran. Leila then went on to obtain their Master's degree in Biotechnology from the University of Tehran as well. After working in the field for a few years, Leila decided to further their education by obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Biological/Biosystems Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While working on their Ph.D., they also obtained a Minor in Business Administration and Management, General from MIT Sloan Executive Education.

Some direct reports include Min Zhang - Software Engineering Data Scientist, Ernest Fraenkel - Co-Founder, and Yen-Lin Chen - Senior Computational Biologist.