Rate My Professor Fatima Merchant

Fatima Merchant, Ph.D., serves as Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Engineering Technology at the University of Houston. She earned her B.E. from the University of Bombay, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Texas. Merchant began her academic career at the University of Houston as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Technology, advancing to Professor in 2020 and subsequently to her current role as Research Professor. She holds additional appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2008, she founded the Computational Biology & Medicine Laboratory (CBML), an interdisciplinary group dedicated to engineering applications in medicine and biology.

Merchant's research centers on computational medicine and quantitative biology, with expertise in multidimensional image acquisition, image analysis, and tissue engineering. Key areas include 3D image analysis for breast anatomy in cancer treatment, clinical decision-support algorithms for patient-specific breast molds, quantitative imaging for fat grafting outcomes in breast surgery, automated urinalysis and spectral data analysis, genomic data visualization in virtual reality, and automated detection of gene duplications, deletions, and cryptic rearrangements. She has co-authored over 140 publications, accumulating 3,144 citations and an h-index of 24 on Google Scholar. Notable works include co-editing the second edition of "Microscope Image Processing" and recent papers such as "Exosc9 Initiates SUMO-Dependent lncRNA TERRA Degradation to Impact Telomeric Integrity in Endocrine Therapy Insensitive Hormone Receptor-Positive Breast Cancer" (2023), "Objective Analysis of Breast Symmetry in Female Patients Undergoing Breast Reconstruction After Total Mastectomy" (2023), and "Impact of Implant-Based Breast Reconstruction on Bra Fit" (2022). As principal investigator, she leads a multi-institutional team awarded a $2.7 million NIH grant in 2024 to develop custom molds for post-mastectomy breast reconstruction, integrating image processing, machine learning, and shape modeling, with evaluation through randomized controlled clinical trials. Her contributions have advanced healthcare imaging and surgical outcomes, fostering collaborations with institutions like UT Austin and MD Anderson Cancer Center. Merchant was honored at the University of Houston President's Circle Awards.