Mehdi Jorfi, Ph.D., is a faculty member in neurology at the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School with a joint appointment at the Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery. He is currently interested in integrating neurobiology and engineering disciplines to address high-impact problems in neuroscience and medicine. Dr. Jorfi’s work takes a multipronged approach to model Alzheimer's human brain on a chip and studies the role of the peripheral immune cells in neurodegenerative diseases. His research utilizes bioengineering, pluripotent stem cell technology, genetic engineering, 3D brain models, and human blood.
He received his Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where he worked on developing mechanically adaptive intracortical microelectrodes to understand the multifaceted role of neuroinflammation in disrupting both biologic and abiologic components of the neural interface circuit. He then undertook postdoctoral research at MIT, focused on organs-on-chips technology, and later at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. At Harvard, he continued his research in modeling human brain tissues in microphysiologically relevant ‘chips’ using stem cell-derived 3D models for studying Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Jorfi has received several awards, including the honorary Faculty Science Prize, HBSI Young Scientist Award, and Mass General Scientific Advisory Committee Distinction Award.