Specific interests

Academic credentials: I completed my BSc in Marine Biology at Ruppin Academic Center. From there, I moved inland to the Weizmann Institute of Science, and joined Gad Asher’s lab in the Biomolecular Sciences Department, for my MSc and PhD. I was awarded the Azrieli Fellowship for Excellence and Leadership, among awards from EMBO, Keystone and others.

In my "wet-lab" research, I worked to elucidate a biological function we all share: timekeeping. Far from being a simplistic watch, mammals have elaborate clock mechanisms that generate daily rhythms in behavior and physiology. A recurrent theme in my work was exploring non-canonical rhythms, such as those that occur in intracellular organelles, or finding novel alternative oscillators (forthcoming in PLOS Bio). 

I grew up in Tel Aviv and dedicated most of her early life to studying and creating art and film. Equipped with this creative mindset, my academic life also included fostering ties between different disciplines and paradigms.

For example, in an independent research project, I collaborated with Gal Manella, a fellow grad student to research the role of metaphors in scientific practice and how does the use of a metaphor shape scientific thinking. We found some cool ways of how the clock metaphor contributed to the design of research questions and experiments throughout the field's growth in the last decades. Our paper was published in PTP-Bio in 2020. (You can find the short story about this in the Weizmann website).

Currently, I am working on the first translation to Hebrew of the masterpiece What is Life. Written by Erwin Schrodinger in 1944, this book provides a physicist's perspective on the pressing biological question of his time. For example, Schrodinger discussed the makeup of genetic material, and in this book he has popularized the metaphor of "genetic code", which is now as ever prevalent in our speech and thought. The book has been said to inspire generations of scientists, including Watson and Crick, and if you haven't done so yet - I urge to read it.

At the CRI I am collaborating with my childhood friend and long-time colleague, Omer Benjakob, to develop ways in which we can do history of science using Wikipedia. This project has been our passion for the last few years, and we have some initial studies that outline our view on how to do this type of research. For examples, see our first case study on circadian clocks, and a more recent one on COVID-19 (forthcoming in GigaScience, see the preprint here). Now we are looking at the CRISPR revolution as our new case study, stay tuned.