This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Prof. Karen B. Avraham | |
---|---|
Born | 1962 Quebec, Canada |
Nationality | US/Israel |
Alma mater | Washington University in St. Louis Weizmann Institute |
Known for | Human Genetics, Deafness, Israeli-Palestinian Scientific Cooperation |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Genetics, Hearing Impairment |
Institutions | Tel Aviv University |
Karen B. Avraham is an Israeli-American human geneticist and the first female Dean of the Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Medicine. [1] Born in Canada in 1962, Avraham moved to the US at a young age[ specify ]. Her research focuses on the discovery and characterization of genes responsible for hereditary hearing loss.
Avraham received her B.A. degree in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the supervision of Yoram Groner, and post-doctoral training at the National Cancer Institute, under the supervision of Nancy Jenkins and Neal Copeland.
As a full professor at Tel Aviv University, and the current Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, [2] Avraham has a laboratory in the Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry and holds the Drs Sarah and Felix Dumont Chair for Research of Hearing Disorders. Currently resides as the President of the Israel Society for Auditory Research (ISAR), Avraham held presidency with the Federation of Israel Societies for Experimental Biology (FISEB/ILANIT, 2017) [3] as well a former board membership of the I-CORE: Gene Regulation in Complex Human Disease. Avraham is a council member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO, 2017), [4] chair of the Scientific Committee of the Fondation pour l'audition in France, [5] council member of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO, 2017), [6] an elected member of the International Collegium Oto-Rhino-Laryngologicum Amicitiae Sacrum (CORLAS), and past president of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO) [7] and the Genetic Society of Israel (GSI). She is an editor of Mammalian Genome (2017), [8] section editor of the European Journal of Human Genetics (2017), [9] associate editor of Human Genomics, and on the advisory editorial board of EMBO Molecular Medicine . [10]
Avraham's research has centered on the discovery of disease genes, focusing on hereditary hearing loss. Her team studies the molecular basis of hearing loss using genetic, developmental, biochemical, cellular and bioinformatic tools. She leads the effort in exome sequencing for the discovery of disease genes to identify mutations that are relevant for the hearing-impaired population. Her group has demonstrated that microRNAs are essential for development and function of inner ear hair cells in vertebrates and has characterized the first long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and methylation in the auditory system.
Avraham has supervised more than 130 students through their M.Sc. or Ph.D. training, students, physicians and post docs have trained in her lab. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, with an H-index of 48, and written reviews and book chapters. [11]
SPIKE (Signaling Pathways Integrated Knowledge Engine) is a database of highly curated interactions for particular human pathways. [12] SPIKE was developed by Avraham, Ron Shamir's computational biology group, and Yosef Shiloh, an Israel Prize recipient for his research in systems biology, all from Tel Aviv University.
Avraham has been awarded the Sir Bernard Katz Prize from the Alexander-von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the Bruno Memorial Prize from the Rothschild Foundation. [13] the Teva Prize for Groundbreaking Research in Field of Rare Diseases from Teva Pharmaceuticals (Israel) and the Teva Founders Prize on Breakthroughs (Israel).
Funding in her laboratory includes from the National Institutes of Health, European Commission, Human Frontiers, I-CORE, Israel Science Foundation and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation.
The Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) is a non-profit organization founded in 1988. HUGO represents an international coordinating scientific body in response to initiatives such as the Human Genome Project. HUGO has four active committees, including the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC), and the HUGO Committee on Ethics, Law and Society (CELS).
Mary-Claire King is an American geneticist. She was the first to show that breast cancer can be inherited due to mutations in the gene she called BRCA1. She studies human genetics and is particularly interested in genetic heterogeneity and complex traits. She studies the interaction of genetics and environmental influences and their effects on human conditions such as breast and ovarian cancer, inherited deafness, schizophrenia, HIV, systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. She has been the American Cancer Society Professor of the Department of Genome Sciences and of Medical Genetics in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington since 1995.
Unconventional myosin-VI, is a protein that in humans is coded for by MYO6. Unconventional myosin-VI is a myosin molecular motor involved in intracellular vesicle and organelle transport.
Ehud Gazit is an Israeli biochemist, biophysicist and nanotechnologist. He is Professor and Endowed Chair at Tel Aviv University and a member of the executive board of the university. In 2015, he was knighted by the Italian Republic for services to science and society. He was recently elected as the 2023 International Solvey Chair in Chemistry, a position that was previously held by 15 of the top world scientists including three Nobel laureates.
Dan Graur \ˈɡra.ur\ is a Romanian-American scientist working in the field of molecular evolution. He is a Moores Professor at the University of Houston and Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is coauthor along with Wen-Hsiung Li of Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution. His Molecular and Genome Evolution was published in 2016.
SPIKE is a database of highly curated interactions for particular human pathways.
Nathan Nelson is an Israeli biochemist and molecular biologist who was awarded the 2013 Israel Prize in Life Sciences. As of January 2012, he has published more than 240 scientific papers which were cited over 15,000 times.
Karen Penelope Steel FRS FMedSci is a British scientist who studies the genetics of deafness, using the mouse as a model to identify the genes involved and to understand the molecular, cellular and physiological mechanisms involved. She is Professor of Sensory Function at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases, King's College London. Previously she was Principal Investigator of the Genetics of Deafness research programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Ron Shamir is an Israeli professor of computer science known for his work in graph theory and in computational biology. He holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics, and is the founder and former head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University.
Steve David Macleod Brown is director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mammalian Genetics Unit, MRC Harwell at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire, a research centre on mouse genetics. In addition, he leads the Genetics and Pathobiology of Deafness research group.
Osnat Penn, born in 1981, is an Israeli computational biologist whose work focuses on molecular evolution, cell research, and immunoinformatics. She is the third Israeli scientist in three years to win the UNESCO-L’Oréal fellowship, which she received in 2013 for her work on the genetic origins of autism. Penn is currently a postdoctorate fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she has been working since 2012.
Anne Carla Ferguson-Smith is a mammalian developmental geneticist. She is the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and International Partnerships at the University of Cambridge. Formerly head of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, she is a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge and serves as President of the Genetics Society.
Kenneth Henry Wolfe is an Irish geneticist and Professor of Genomic Evolution at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.
Denise P. Barlow was a British geneticist who worked in the field of epigenomics. Barlow was an elected member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), an honorary professor of genetics at the University of Vienna and recipient of the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 1991, she discovered the first mammalian imprinted gene, IGF2R, which codes for the insulin-like growth factor.
Naama Barkai is an Israeli systems biologist and professor for Molecular Genetics and Physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).
Albert Pinhasov is the Rector of Ariel University. He is a researcher in the fields of Molecular Psychiatry and Psychopharmacology. Prior to being elected as the Rector, he served as the Vice President and Dean for Research & Development and the Head of the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University.
Yardena Samuels or Samuels-Lev is an Israeli molecular biologist who is the Director of the Ekard Institute for Cancer Diagnosis Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research considers the genetic mutations of melanoma.
Tamir Tuller is an Israeli engineer, a computer scientist, and a systems and synthetic biologist. He is a professor and the director of Tel Aviv University's Laboratory of Computational Systems and Synthetic Biology. As of February 2022, Tuller has authored over 150 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and hundreds of additional types of publications and patents. In addition, he is the founder and primary instructor of the International Genetically Engineered Machine program at Tel Aviv University and an entrepreneur.
Nissim Benvenisty is Professor of Genetics, the Herbert Cohn Chair in Cancer Research and the Director of “The Azrieli Center for Stem Cells and Genetic Research” at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, Hebrew University.
Sagiv Shifman is an Israeli scientist, professor in the field of neurogenetics at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds the Arnold and Bess Zeldich Ungerman chair in Neurobiology.