Asma Farhat holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Biomedical Science from the University of Sheffield. She completed her PhD at the Medical University of Vienna and the Research Center for Molecular Medicine in the group of Professor Sylvia Knapp. Her doctoral work uncovered how aging alters immune cell function and drives tissue pathology in organs such as the lung, contributing to the onset and persistence of age-associated disease. Asma received a Simons Foundation fellowship to support her postdoctoral studies.

Asma’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.

In her postdoctoral work in the Naik lab, Asma 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.