Award-Winning Scholars
Our scholars are decorated with many awards. Here is a partial list:
Prof. Eran Bacharach
The Bacharach lab investigates virus-cell interactions. Cancer-related topics include how cancer-causing viruses (the murine leukemia viruses) change the genome of infected cells, and how to engineer viruses to infect and kill cancer, but not normal cells.
Eran Bacharach received the Rosansky Award by The Herbert Irving Cancer Center, Columbia University, and the Sarov Prize in Microbiology by the Israel Society for Microbiology.
Prof. Adit Ben Baruch
The Ben-Baruch lab aims at providing a personalized approach to breast cancer research, based on understanding the properties of the tumor microenvironment. The lab focuses mainly on the immune milieu of breast tumors and the way it impacts metastasis-promoting activities .
Adit Ben-Baruch served as the Head or member of several cancer-related committees and organizations; recently she received a special Prize Award from the Israel Cancer Research Fund and was an awardee of the Chicago Sister Cities International Medical Initiative Award.
Prof. Judith Berman
The Berman lab studies mechanisms of drug tolerance, the ability to survive lethal drug treatments. The work is performed in the model yeast pathogenic species Candida which cause life-threatening infections in patients with reduced immunity, for example after cancer chemotherapy. The study of multidrug resistance, has important implications for the study of how cancer cells develop tolerance to the drugs used to treat them.
Prof. Berman was elected as honorific member in several world associations, such as EMBO member (European Molecular Biology Organization), The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology.
Prof. Tal Dvir
The Dvir lab focuses on engineering tissues for regenerative Medicine and for Drug Screening. The lab engineers hearts, intestines, retina and neuronal tissues, as well as mimics of tumor microenvironments. To achieve this goal, a state-of-the-art, advanced technologies such as nanofabrication, microfluidics, 3D printing and micro-electronics are used.
Prof. Dvir is a rising star who received many awards and prizes, among them are the Rappaport prize for excellent biomedical researcher (2018), and the Juludan prize for outstanding scientific research achievements (2018).
Prof. Marcelo Ehrlich
The Ehrlich lab investigates cancer cell biology and virus-host interactions, with special focus on how tumor-associated signal transduction mechanisms regulate cellular function in general, and their ability to resist viral infection in particular. The subject-matter of its study has broad implications to the interactions of the tumor cell with the immune system, and on its ability to develop virus-based immunotherapy agents (e.g., oncolytic viruses).
Marcelo Ehrlich has published close to 80 papers in top scientific journals, and is currently the head of the Ela Kodesz Institute for Research on Cancer Development and Prevention.
Prof. Irit Gat-Viks
Prof. Gat-Viks is a computational biologist, focusing on the application of computational techniques in the field of personalized medicine. Specifically, natural diversity in a population of individuals is exploited to reveal the underlying biological mechanisms that are either related to disease or associate with drug response. The research relies on clinical and “omics” data collected in a population of individuals, including murine data of influenza and S. Pneumonia infections and human data of specific disease such as atherosclerosis, metabolic syndrome, sepsis and response to immuno-therapy in solid tumors.
Prof Gat-Viks was graduated from the Adi Lautman’s program for the fostering of excellence at Tel Aviv University and won the Krill prize of the Wolf Foundation (2014).
Prof. Ehud Gazit
The Gazit lab is concerned with the process of molecular self-assembly of proteins, peptides, and many other biomolecules into nanostructures.
This work is relevant to basic physiological processes as well as various disease states, such as: degenerative disorders, inborn errors disorders as well as malignancy processes in which tumor suppressor proteins are forming aggregative structures.
The basic mechanistic understanding of these processes discovered by the Gazit group will enable to design small compounds that halt the assembly process, thereby serving as novel drugs for neurodegenerative disease and cancer. Its most advanced compound is already in clinical trials for the treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
2015 | Knighthood, Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia (OSSI), Italian Republic
2015 | Kadar Family Award for Outstanding Research
2015 | Elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
2016 | Thomas McMahon Lecture, Harvard University
2016 | ERC Advanced Grant, European Research Council
2018 | Foreign Fellow, National Academy of Sciences, India (FNASc)
2019 | Rappaport Prize for Excellence in the Field of Biomedical Research
Prof. Anat Herskovits
The Herskovits Lab is studying how bacterial pathogens cooperate with their prophages during infection of mammalian cells. Bacteriophages are obligatory parasites yet, when integrated into the chromosome of their bacterial host they support its survival under certain circumstances. The lab is using various genetic, computational and biochemical methods to study the interaction between bacterial pathogens and bacteriophages.
Prof. Herskovits received the Moshe-Shiloh Prize for excellent studies in Microbiology. She won two consecutive ERC grants, starter and Consolidator, and is the President of the Israel Society of Microbiology.
Prof. Martin Kupiec
The Kupiec lab studies the basic mechanisms that maintain the stability of the genome. Genome instability is a hallmark of cancer cells and increases with aging. Among different subjects, we study the mechanisms that maintain telomere length, the repair of DNA damage and the source of mutations during cell growth.
Prof. Martin Kupiec has received the National Landau Prize for Genetics and is currently the President of the Genetics Society of Israel. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, serves in the Editorial board of several important scientific publications and is the Editor in Chief of Current Genetics.
Prof. Dan Peer
The Peer lab focuses on RNA Therapeutics in Cancer and Inflammation based on Personalized Medicine. The lab was the first in the world to show systemic delivery of Therapeutic RNAs into specific cell types. His lab has translated several technologies into clinical testing (more than 10 different clinical trials are ongoing from phase 1-3). One drug is under registration within the US FDA and the European Medical Agency (EMA).
2011-13 | Innovator Award and Breakthrough Award – Kenneth Rainin Foundation
2017 | The Nanos Award – Life Achievement Award in NanoMedicine, Basel, Switzerland.
Prof. Tal Pupko
The Pupko lab is concerned with various fields of Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics. In Molecular evolution we study the evolutionary selective forces shaping genes and genomes and the in-silico predictions of these forces using probabilistic evolutionary models. In phylogenetics we reconstruct evolutionary relationships and ancestral sequences and study sequence alignment. In pathogenomics, we develop and apply machine-learning tools for predicting effector proteins in pathogenic bacteria. In immunoformatics, we develop algorithms for analyzing phage display experiments.
Tal Pupko serves as associate editor in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution and is the President of the Israeli Society of Evolutionary Biology. He received The Krill award (Wolf Foundation) for excellence in scientific research, the Hestrin Prize of the Israel Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ISBMB), and the PNAS Cozzarelli Prize (The National Academy of Science, USA), which "recognizes recently published PNAS papers of outstanding scientific excellence and originality". Finally, he obtained the Rector award for excellence in teaching.
Prof. Gil Segal
The Segal lab studies the regulation, function and evolution of pathogenesis systems of intracellular pathogens. Our research focuses mainly on the bacterial pathogen Legionella the causative agent of legionnaire’s disease, a life-threatening pneumonia in immunocompromised patients. We are aimed at uncovering the mechanisms by which this human pathogen manipulates its host cells and illuminate novel aspects in host-pathogen interaction.
Prof. Segal received the Alon Fellowship from the Israeli Ministry of Education and was recently elected as a member of the American Academy of Microbiology.
Dr. Adi Stern
The Stern lab focuses on the evolution and genomics of rapidly evolving systems, including viruses and cancer cells. By combining mathematical modelling with wet lab experiments, we aim to predict and prevent the next epidemic.
Dr. Stern is an early career investigator who has received over a dozen scientific awards, and has recently been nominated as a recipient of the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) starting grant.
Prof. Issac Witz
Metastasis is the cause of 90% of human cancer deaths and brain metastasis are among the deadliest ones. The skin cancer melanoma has the highest propensity to metastasize to the brain compared to other cancers. The goal of our lab is to prevent or at least cure melanoma brain metastasis. To meet this goal, we identify factors intrinsic to melanoma cells as well as brain factors (cells and molecules) that lead melanoma metastasis to the brain. The long term goal is to drugs that could fight melanoma producing factors.
Prof. Witz is world leader in the study of cancer. As such he was elected as a Member of the World Academy of Art and Science, received the Jacqueline Seroussi Award for Cancer Research (with Judah Folkman) and received Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Vienna, Austria.
