Lena Al-Harthi, PhD, is a professor and associate chair in the Department of Immunity & Emerging Pathogens. She is also the program director of the Rush Initiative to Maximize Student Development, or Rush-IMSD, an NIH-funded training grant for underrepresented minority PhD students enrolled in the PhD in Integrated Biomedical Sciences program in the Graduate College. Al-Harthi received her PhD from the George Washington University in microbiology. Her dissertation research was conducted as an NIH pre-intramural research training fellow at the laboratory of tumor cell biology, headed by Robert Gallo, MD, a co-discoverer of HIV and under the mentorship of Suresh Arya, PhD. She then conducted her postdoctoral training in HIV immunology at Rush University Medical Center in the laboratory of Alan Landay, PhD. Her research is focused on HIV/host interactions, with a special emphasis on bridging basic and clinical science in the HIV/AIDS field. Al-Harthi has more than 70 peer-reviewed publications and reviews and has given many invited talks worldwide relating to HIV pathogenesis, especially in the central nervous system. She served on national and international grant review study sections, where she chaired or co-chaired several of these panels, and was the chair of the NeuroAIDS and other End-Organ Diseases NIH study section. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals, was the program director for the Division of Immunology and Microbiology at Rush for eight years, and she continues to be actively engaged in mentoring graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty.

Lena Al-Harthi's research interest includes immunology and its related field.