After receiving a bachelor degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Sciences at Fes, Morocco, Dr M. Maftahi went to France where he obtained his D.E.A. in Microbiology at the Pasteur Institute of Paris where he was studying prokaryotic viruses. In 1997 M. Maftahi obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in Microbiology. During his years of scientific education and training he became proficient with molecular biological and biochemical techniques. In his thesis work he was also involved in the yeast genome project where he sequenced and characterized several genes. He developed a new technique to "knock out" genes to study their functions, and has published several articles on these topics.

Since September 1997 Dr. Maftahi has been a research scientist at Columbia University in NY. He is participating in a major research project on understanding the function of genes implicated in genome stability, and in which the loss of function can lead to early and multiple variety of cancers as well as to the premature aging syndrome. A present, Dr Maftahi is a faculty member of the Public school of health where he continues his career as an assistant Professor. He is also member of Biomatec-US, the Moroccan association of biologists, which tries to build ties between Moroccan scientists as well as to elaborate different ways to interact positively with our country.

Dr Maftahi has multiple interests beside science; one of the most important is music. He started classical music in the Spanish institute back when he was living in Morocco, then as a guitarist he played different styles…from folk and country music. He played in a band during two years in Paris with other friends before coming to New York where he learned other music styles. At present he's very interested in Caribbean music particularly Cuban and Puertorican traditional music, which gave birth to salsa and shares a lot of sounds with the Spanish traditional music, which has been influenced for centuries with the extensive variety of the North African music.