In the tiniest, most vulnerable patients, she saw herself

Alison Farrar.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community
In the tiniest, most vulnerable patients, she saw herself

Alvin Powell

Harvard Staff Writer

May 11, 2026 6 min read

Caring for premature babies sparked Alison Farrar’s passion for psychiatry. Helping callers to a crisis hotline sealed it.

Part of the Commencement 2026 series

A collection of features and graduate profiles covering Harvard’s 375th Commencement.

When Alison Farrar was in high school in southern California, she volunteered at a local hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. In the tiniest babies, she saw reflections of herself.

“I had been born very prematurely so I had this connection with the patients that we were serving,” said Farrar, who was born two months early after her mother developed sepsis. “I always heard stories growing up about being born so small. When I was born, I was really sick, my mom was really sick.”

The East Los Angeles hospital took care of many disadvantaged families. And as Farrar held the babies and talked with the parents, she saw how some families were struggling to make ends meet, and some babies’ difficulties didn’t end with being premature.

“We took care of a lot of babies waiting to go into the foster care system,” Farrar said. “A lot of it was holding the babies and talking with the families. I got to practice my Spanish and support people going through that emotionally difficult time. I felt that was special work.”

That special work launched Farrar onto a path that led to Alabama, Boston and Harvard Medical School, Oxford, and back. Along the way, she hasn’t wavered in her vision of using medicine to help others, but has taken a broad view, one that embraces physics and math and saw her contributing to research into drug resistance while staffing an overnight crisis hotline — and one that will have her marking her HMS graduation this spring with classmates as she anticipates a career in psychiatry.

That early hospital experience also helped Farrar see the importance of technology. She had heard how risky her own entry into the world was, and how decades earlier it would have been unlikely that she survived.

“I saw how technology had the ability to make a difference. Babies who wouldn’t have survived 20 years ago, we were sending home. I realized this was something I really wanted to contribute to.”
Alison Farrar

“I saw how technology had the ability to make a difference. Babies who wouldn’t have survived 20 years ago, we were sending home,” Farrar said. “I realized this was something I really wanted to contribute to.”

Farrar attended the University of Alabama to study physics and mathematics, hoping to apply those skills in medical research. She volunteered at a free clinic, running the diagnostic lab there, where she tested blood and urine samples and even drew blood herself, perfecting the art of relaxing people while standing with a needle in her hand. As with the urban poor she had seen in East LA, most of the Alabama patients were underinsured, and Farrar could see the struggles common between the two populations, even though their daily circumstances were at times starkly different.

“One patient was late for his appointment because his horse was sick. He’d been planning to ride his horse and had trouble getting another ride,” Farrar said. “Things were very different, but it still reinforced the same passion about how to use technology to improve care for people who are underserved.”

Farrar was accepted into the Harvard/MIT M.D.-Ph.D. program, and in 2018 arrived on campus for her first two years of study. When the time came to choose her Ph.D. program, however, she chose to study at Oxford University, where, from 2020 to 2024, she earned a D.Phil. in interdisciplinary bioscience. At Oxford, she worked in the lab of biophysicist Achilles Kapanidis. Among other projects, Farrar worked to develop a rapid test for antibiotic resistance that used the altered distribution of cellular ribosomes, tiny protein factories inside the cell.

Earlier work showed that ribosomes shift within the cell after exposure to antibiotics. Farrar and colleagues first made the ribosomes fluorescent, then exposed the cells to antibiotics, which shifted the ribosomes in a predictable way. The patterns were evaluated using an AI deep learning algorithm.

Published in the journal Communications Biology in 2025, the study, with Farrar as first author, showed that the process was highly sensitive: 99 percent effective at detecting drug resistance after examining just two cells. That finding, researchers wrote, had the potential to dramatically decrease processing time — from days to as little as 30 minutes — by eliminating the need to culture cells in order to have enough for analysis.

Farrar’s varied academic background — blending math, physics, and her medical training at HMS — gave her a unique, multidisciplinary perspective among the team, Kapanidis said.

“She’s versatile, fearless, and very, very motivated,” Kapanidis said, adding that much of the work was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which added its own challenges and complexities. “She has this spirit of looking forward, being very positive not only as a scientist but as a person, a lab citizen.”

Despite the lab work, Farrar didn’t forget about the people experiencing challenges in their lives. She coordinated the Oxford Nightline, an overnight hotline staffed seven days a week for people in crisis. And there were plenty, she said, with the pandemic taking its toll on mental health, on campus and beyond.

“That was a really meaningful part of my time at Oxford, and I think led me to psychiatry,” Farrar said. “The seeds were sown when I was working in the NICU, but working with Nightline, people were calling in situations of mental health crisis and we were helping them through those moments.”

After earning her D.Phil. in 2024, Farrar returned to HMS for her last two years of medical school, time dominated by the clinical rotations that expose students to different medical specialties. Key clerkships for Farrar were at McLean Hospital’s psychosis unit, on Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s consult psychiatry team, and, in the months leading up to Commencement, in Massachusetts General Hospital’s emergency psychiatry unit.

With both an M.D. and a D.Phil. under her belt, Farrar, who is entering the psychiatry residency research track at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is looking forward to beginning her career as a doctor and continuing her training, which combines clinical training and research.

“I definitely want to continue doing a mix of research and treating patients,” Farrar said. “I’m really interested in digital mental health, wearable devices, and how those can be used in psychiatry research. I’m really looking forward to the next chapter and seeing where my clinical experiences and interests lead me.”