Research/Areas of Interest
Dr. Alqaderi's research focuses on applying Artificial Intelligence across different aspects of research, including understanding the role of oral biofluids in diagnosing systemic diseases, with particular emphasis on saliva research. She directs the Dental AI Lab at Tufts University, which focuses on image analysis, Large Language Models, and machine learning. Through her leadership of the AI lab, she is stimulating AI agentic applications in dentistry.
She has been closely associated with national and international institutes, collaborating on multiple research projects, including the Kuwait Healthy Life Study and a COVID-19 study. During her involvement in the Kuwait Healthy Life Study as Co-Principal Investigator, she identified salivary biomarkers that can predict the risk of diabetes in children. She led several published papers from this study, one of which demonstrated that salivary C-Reactive Protein (CRP) and insulin correlated with blood CRP and insulin levels and predicted hyperglycemia in adolescents.
She was the Principal Investigator in a COVID-19 study, where she collaborated with institutions in Kuwait and the U.S., such as the J. Craig Venter Institute, to investigate the predictive value of the salivary microbiome for COVID-19 status. She demonstrated in her research that the salivary microbiome was predictive of COVID-19 status and severity. Her findings also indicated that the oral immune response plays unique roles during the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection when compared to systemic responses.
