Siddiqi Laboratory
Dr. Omar Siddiqi is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. He obtained his MD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in 2004. He completed neurology training and epilepsy fellowship from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center from 2004 – 2010. He was a Fogarty International Clinical Research Fellow at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia under the mentorship of Dr. Igor Koralnik at the Center of Vaccine and Virology Research from 2010 – 2011. He received his MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2015. He was based full-time at the University of Zambia School of Medicine from 2010 – 2021 where he continues to hold an appointment as Visiting Lecturer. Dr. Siddiqi’s laboratory has been involved in research to understand the disease burden of central nervous system opportunistic infections in HIV-infected Zambian adults. His laboratory uses molecular diagnostics and post-mortem tissue samples to classify the etiology of meningitis and encephalitis among HIV-infected Zambians. More recently his work has focused on evaluating the performance of point of care diagnostics for tuberculous meningitis. He has also been involved in a cohort study over the last 10 years establishing the causes of new-onset seizures in HIV-positive children and adults in attempt to determine risk factors for the development of epilepsy. He helped to start the first neurophysiology laboratory and neurology training program in Zambia. He is also one of the founding members of the Zambia Institute of Neurological Care, Research, and Education (ZINCARE).
