Affiliation: University of Pittsburgh

Maliha Zahid is a practicing cardiologist and NIH-funded scientist. Her areas of expertise lie in the field of cell penetrating peptides, use of phage-display to identify specific tissue-targeting peptides, respiratory motile cilia, and cilia biology. Her graduate thesis work led to the identification of a 12-amino acid unique cardiac-targeting peptide that is being developed as a novel cardiac vector. Further work in her early faculty years has led to the identification of two lung-targeting peptides. During her post-graduate years, she developed a protocol for culturing and reciliating cells from human nasal epithelial scrapes and mouse tracheal epithelial tissue and developed a protocol for siRNA knockdown of known and putative cilia genes, allowing for the study of biological processes that are important in ciliogenesis. Her lab has also developed an in vivo mucociliary clearance measurement in mice using dual modality SPECT/CT imaging, and shown a differential effect of anesthetics on this clearance.