Asma Farhat, M.Sc.

Asma Farhat will join the laboratory of Dr. Shruti Naik at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Allen Discovery Center for Neuroimmune Interactions as a postdoctoral fellow. Farhat holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Biomedical Science from the University of Sheffield and is completing her Ph.D. at the Medical University of Vienna and the Research Center for Molecular Medicine in the group of Professor Sylvia Knapp.

Farhat’s overarching research interest is to understand how inflammatory events and the crosstalk between immune cells and tissues shape tissue resilience or dysfunction, particularly during critical windows of life such as early development and aging. During her doctoral work, she uncovered how aging alters immune cell function and drives tissue pathology in organs such as the lung, which contributes to the onset and persistence of age-associated disease.

In her postdoctoral work in the Naik lab, Farhat will investigate how early-life inflammation affects the specification and function of skin-innervating sensory neurons. By examining how neuroimmune interactions are shaped during the postnatal period, her research aims to uncover how early-life exposures at barrier sites influence long-term neuroimmune states, with implications for sensory processing and neurodevelopmental health.