Melis Anahtar

About Melis Anahtar

Melis Anahtar was born in Maryland to parents from Turkey. 

Melis studied at MIT, where she earned a perfect 5.0 GPA and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, Melis earned an MSc degree in immunology during her year at Oxford. She went on to receive an MD/PhD at the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program, where the P. D. Soros award supported her PhD in Immunology from Harvard. Melis completed her residency training in Clinical Pathology and fellowship in Medical Microbiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Jim Collins' lab at the Broad Institute and MIT. 

Melis is now a physician-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She leads a research group that uses genomics and machine learning to combat antimicrobial resistance through improved diagnostics and therapeutics. She is also an Assistant Director of the Clinical Microbiology Lab. She previously co-founded Day Zero Diagnostics, a sequencing-based infectious disease diagnostic company that was acquired in 2025.