Aliaa Barakat PhD

Dr. Barakat is mathematician, biological scientist, and health care researcher. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and held postdoctoral appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. In 2009, she started a personal journey with an interstitial lung disease that spurred her strong interest in patient-centered research, health equity, and regulatory policies, and inspired her to devote her research to applications in medicine. She founded and directs the Pulmonary Care and Research Collaborative and its ILD Collaborative, dedicated to improving health outcomes for pulmonary patients, and establishing a nationwide data infrastructure to facilitate and efficiently conduct cross-institutional clinical research driven by the needs of patients and their physicians. Drawing on her leadership of the ILD Collaborative, she joined the Accessible Research Commons for Health (ARCH), PCORI's Harvard-led clinical data research network, as Patient Partner and Engagement Lead. In this role, she developed ARCH's stakeholder engagement policy, and provided strategic guidance on patient-driven research opportunities for ARCH. As a senior staff scientist in the Molecular Biomarkers Nano-Imaging Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dr. Barakat's research has focused on the mechanistic molecular underpinnings of age-related diseases, and the development of minimally invasive translational tools that could provide clinicians with quantitative molecular information for the diagnosis of disease before irreversible structural damage occurs. Dr. Barakat is a researcher at the department of Pulmonary and Clinical Care Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital where her work is focused on using data science and community-based participatory research methodologies across the translational science spectrum to improve health care quality and patient outcomes. Dr. Barakat holds a master's degree in clinical mental health counseling, and is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychoanalysis and social psychology.