Melika Moradi Selected as a Trainee Under the STAGE Program.

STAGE Prairies is pleased to announce that Melika Moradi has been selected as a STAGE Trainee with her project, “Predicting Antimicrobial Resistance in Chronic suppurative lung diseases from Genomic and Clinical Data Using Machine Learning”

Melika Moradi is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Snyder Insititute for Chronic Diseases at the University of Calgary, where she is conducting research under the supervision of Drs. Lisa Lix, Kevin McGregor, and Mina Aminghafari.

She earned a doctorate in Medical Microbiology from Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences in Iran. During her PhD, she received the Mitacs Globalink Award, which enabled her to come to Canada as a visiting graduate student. She later received the Alberta Innovates Postdoctoral Recruitment Award at the University of Calgary.

Melika’s prior training as a clinical microbiologist, combined with experience in AMR research, pathogen genomics and bacterial epidemiology, variant analysis, patient-linked clinical datasets, hospital workflow systems (EDC/CTMS), and the discovery of novel antimicrobials for lung infections, provides a strong foundation for her STAGE project.

Her STAGE project aims to develop the first precision AMR-guided treatment platform for CSLD by integrating WGS data, longitudinal clinical metadata, and AMR profiles using advanced ML methods. The main research question is whether genomic signatures and clinical features of chronic P. aeruginosa infection can be combined to enable risk stratification, predict treatment success, and guide personalized antibiotic selection.

STAGE is proud to support Melika in her research endeavors and looks forward to her contributions in enabling evidence-based, personalized treatment decisions that improve outcomes while limiting AMR in CSLD care.