Leila Pirhaji
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Leila Pirhaji (born May 17, 1986) is an Iranian computational biologist and tech entrepreneur. She is the CEO and founder of ReviveMed, a biotech company that started up in 2018. She previously worked on artificial intelligence at the Professor Ernest Fraenkel Lab at MIT and at ETH Zürich.
Early life and education[edit]
Pirhaji was born in Esfahan, Iran on May 17, 1986. She received a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Biotechnology from the University of Tehran in 2008.[citation needed] Between her undergraduate and master's degree, Pirhaji was a visiting scientist at the ETH Zurich institute, developing algorithms that inferred protein interaction networks from mass spectrometry data.[citation needed] She then pursued a Master's degree in biotechnology immediately after graduation, completing it in 2010. During her time in graduate school, she served a role as Master Research Assistant in developing a new algorithm that predicts gene regulatory networks from gene expression data.[1][better source needed] In 2010, Pirhaji moved to the US to start her PhD at MIT in Biological/Biosystems Engineering. In 2016, she completed her dissertation, titled “Revealing disease-associated pathways and components by systematic integration of large-scale biological data” under the supervision of Professor Ernest Fraenkel.[2]
Career[edit]
In 2013, Pirhaji worked shortly at Takeda Oncology developing a pipeline for Next Generation Sequencing analysis for cancer patients being treated in order to identify biomarkers associated with the drug response. In the summer of 2014, Pirhaji worked at Merck on molecular stratification of pancreatic cancer by using transcriptional and mutational data. From 2011 - 2016, she worked as a doctoral research assistant at MIT, before becoming a postdoctoral research associate in 2016. Not long after graduating from MIT, Pirhaji used her expertise on drug discovery and characterizing molecules from blood tissue to start up her company, ReviveMed, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Joined by data scientist Demarcus Briers and biotech scientist Richard Howell, Pirhaji raised $1.5 million in funding for ReviveMed from Rivas Capital, TechU, Team Builder Ventures, and WorldQuant.[3]
Honors and awards[edit]
In 2019, Pirhaji was selected as a part of the 20 TED Fellows selected for that year.[4]
In 2020, Pirhaji was acknowledge by MIT's Technology Review as one of their 35 Innovators under 35.[5] She has also won funding rounds in competitions held by StartMIT, StartIAP, MIT100K, and the Sandbox Innovation Fund Program[6] for her work in biotechnology.
References[edit]
- ^ Pirhaji, Leila. "Leila Pirhaji". LinkedIn. Leila Pirhaji. Retrieved 13 November 2020.
- ^ Pirhaji, Leila (2016). Revealing disease-associated pathways and components by systematic integration of large-scale biological data. DSpace@MIT (Thesis). MIT Libraries. hdl:1721.1/104227. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
- ^ Coldeway, Devin (18 April 2018). "ReviveMed turns drug discovery into a big data problem and raises $1.5M to solve it". TechCrunch. TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
- ^ "ReviveMed CEO Dr. Leila Pirhaji selected as a TED Fellow". BusinessWire. BusinessWire. 24 January 2019. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
- ^ "Leila Pirhaji". MIT Technology Review. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
- ^ Murphy, Meg. "At MIT, a culture of innovation never gets old". MIT News. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
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