Melis Anahtar is the child of immigrants from Turkey
Fellowship awarded to support work towards an MD in Medicine at Harvard University
Melis 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 is now in her second year as an MD/PhD candidate at the Harvard - MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program and will begin a PhD in immunology at Harvard in the fall
Melis's research projects at MIT ranged from synthesizing nanoparticles for cancer detection to studying novel drug delivery methods. She served as editor-in-chief of the MIT Undergraduate Research Journal.Her research projects at Harvard have resulted in three co-authored papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, five scientific papers as a first-author in MIT publications, and numerous presentations at scientific meetings, symposia and conferences.
Research Melis did during a bioengineering internship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston earned her a place as a finalist at the 2004 Intel Science Talent Search and first prize in engineering at the Intel Science and Engineering Fair.