Adam Haber, PhD

Adam Haber, PhD is an Associate Professor of Computational Biology and Environmental Health in the Department of Environmental Health, and holds a secondary appointment in the Biostatistics Department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His work analyzes the impacts of environmental exposures on lung disease, particularly asthma, aiming towards reducing disparities and overall burden by investigating both its molecular and social causes.

As a postdoc Dr. Haber co-led a study that discovered a new type of lung cell, which the research team termed the pulmonary ionocyte. Pulmonary ionocytes are a rare type of airway epithelial cell that is responsible for governing key properties of airway surface liquid physiology, and deeply implicated in the pathogenesis of cystic fibrosis. Dr. Haber’s group continues to apply computational analysis to investigate the role of cell type heterogeneity in carrying out the functions of the airway’s defenses against inhaled toxins, pathogens, and allergens, while recognizing that molecular physiology alone cannot explain or reduce the major health disparities in lung disease burden, particularly in asthma.

Aiming to reduce and eliminate these disparities in disease burden, Dr. Haber applies geospatial methods to map the social forces that produce unequal exposures in the community. His group’s analysis of tenant reports of unhealthy housing conditions in Boston identified major disparities in exposure burden and governmental response. Dr. Haber’s group also recently showed that very high rates of asthma attacks at a housing complex can be a warning sign, a ‘canary in the coal mine’, that can be used to accurately identify the presence of dangerous indoor exposures that are otherwise hard to detect across the city in a scalable manner. Together these research directions enable the Haber lab to work towards improving the quality of available diagnostics and treatment and eliminating disparities in asthma morbidity and mortality.

Dr. Haber received his PhD from the University of New South Wales in Australia in 2016, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute in 2020. He is a current William T. Grant Scholar and was a Parker B. Francis Fellow (2020-2023), the Harvard NIEHS Center for Environmental Health New Investigator (2024-2025), and received the American Thoracic Society Respiratory Structure and Function Assembly’s Rising Star Award in 2024. His work has been featured by The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Stat News, and The Scientist.