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Maha Farhat

M.D., M.Sc.

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics

Harvard Medical School

Dr. Farhat is an Assistant Professor of of Biomedical Informatics atHarvard Medical School and a 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. Farhat's work has focused on bacterial and viral pathoges 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.

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. 

Maha Farhat

M.D., M.Sc.

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics

Harvard Medical School

Dr. Farhat is an Assistant Professor of of Biomedical Informatics atHarvard Medical School and a 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. Farhat's work has focused on bacterial and viral pathoges 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.

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. 

Recent Publications

Gene conversion is a key driver of diversity hotspots in M. tuberculosis antigens and virulence-associated loci

Published On 2026 Apr 10

Journal article

Despite the long-held view of Mycobacterium tuberculosis ( Mtb ) as a genetically conserved pathogen, many genomic regions remain poorly resolved due to high sequence homology and repetitive content. Using complete genome assemblies generated from long-read sequencing of 151 globally representative clinical isolates, we comprehensively analyzed genome-wide patterns of genetic diversity and evolution across the Mtb genome. Our analysis uncovers pronounced diversity hotspots within paralogous...


Benchmarking within-sample minority variant detection with short-read sequencing in M. tuberculosis

Published On 2026 Feb 27

Journal article

CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis provides evidence to support best practices for low-frequency variant calling, including tool choice, masking and filtering. We also develop and provide a new error model that excludes false positive low-frequency variant calls from FreeBayes output.