Annual Forum 2025 / Speakers

Prof. Malach’s central research aim is to uncover principles by which the human brain gives rise to high-level cognitive functions such as spontaneous and creative behaviors, as well as the boundary between conscious and subconscious perceptual processes. To that end, he combines functional brain imaging using magnetic resonance with invasive electrophysiological recordings, performed for diagnostic purposes in patients. His lab studies brain activity patterns and their link to conscious visual perception, memory processes, and free and creative behaviors. His group has published over 170 papers. Born in Israel, Prof. Malach earned a BSc in biology (1974) and an MSc in neurobiology (1977) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his PhD in physiological optics in 1982 from the University of California at Berkeley. He then spent several years as a postdoctoral fellow studying neuroanatomy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was the recipient of the 2010 Helen and Martin Kimmel Award for Innovative Investigation and received the EMET prize in the Life Sciences in 2022 for his achievements in brain research in the areas of vision, consciousness, and spontaneous behavior.

Dr. Ramot has received numerous awards and fellowships for her academic activities, including a Weizmann Institute / Revson Women in Science Postdoctoral award from 2014-2016, and the 2018 NIMH Seymour S. Kety Memorial Fellowship Training Award. In 2022, she was selected as a Zuckerman Faculty Scholar, through the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program. Dr. Ramot, has served as ad hoc editor for several prestigious journals and given invited talks and presentations around the world. Dr. Ramot served in the Intelligence Corps of the Israel Defense Forces from 1998 to 2000, after which she completed a BSc in mathematics and an interdisciplinary minor in the humanities as part of the Amirim Honors Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004. She earned her PhD in 2013 from Hebrew University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Neural Computation, under the joint supervision of Prof. Leon Deouell and Prof. Rafi Malach. Following an initial postdoctoral fellowship in Prof. Malach’s Weizmann Institute lab, Dr. Ramot joined Prof. Alex Martin’s intramural Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Ramot is married with two children.

Dr. David’s PhD in Chemistry at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology used X‑crystallography, biochemistry and biophysics to research and determine the structure of the phycobilisome, a photosynthetic antenna complex that is one of the largest protein complexes in nature. During her postdoc, Dr. David followed her passion for studying large and challenging molecular assemblies. She served concurrently as an Instructor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, and as a Scientist in the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, acquiring in-depth training in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and cell biology. At Harvard she began her research into CBM, for which she was awarded the prestigious Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Cancer Research Institute. She also began her interest in the programmed inflammatory cell death pathway in innate immunity, which continues with her current lab’s Ninjurin research. As one of the few female scientists in the field of cryoEM, Dr. David hopes to significantly impact the field of structural immunology and cancer research.

For her PhD research in Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Dr. Elkan developed supramolecular membranes for water purification that were recyclable, and environmentally friendly. For her postdoctoral research, Dr. Elkan worked in both the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston and the Department of Physics of Complex Systems at the Weizmann Institute. In both labs, she pioneered new research directions. Inspired by optical elements in marine organisms, she developed a unique optical device for polarization holography, made entirely from organic crystals. She also implemented the study of crystal growth mechanisms to develop crystals with self-healing properties that can regrow and repair after defect formation.

Her postdoctoral research at Stanford School of Medicine’s Department of Genetics was supported by EMBO, Larry L. Hillblom Foundation, SSSI and the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). Dr. Maor-Nof applied genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics molecular and cellular approaches to elucidate the mechanism underlying neuronal cell death and axonal degeneration.

Dr. Pearl Mizrahi’s postdoc research focused on how interactions between different bacteria shape the structure and function of the microbial community, and how such a community evolves under antibiotic stress.

For his PhD in Genomics at Bar-Ilan University he made groundbreaking discoveries in genomic plasticity, identifying a novel mechanism of enzyme-induced evolution in primate genomes, and revealing the importance of editing micro-RNAs (miRNAs) in human cancers. During his postdoctoral research at the School of Medicine at Stanford University, he utilized his expertise in genomics to address fundamental questions about human phages, leading to the development of Phanta—a tool for profiling gut bacteriophages and their bacterial hosts in the human gut, with the goal of promoting phage-inclusive studies of microbiomes. Dr. Pinto hopes to eventually develop phage-based diagnostic tools for infections and diseases and enhance Israel's leadership in microbiome research.

Realizing the importance of integrating developmental biology and stress physiology, Dr. Shaar-Moshe pursued postdoctoral training at the University of California, Davis’s Department of Plant Biology and Genome Center, where she investigated the possibility of harnessing the salt tolerance of wild tomatoes to enhance this tolerance in domesticated tomatoes. Her lab’s findings could enhance crop productivity and agricultural sustainability in the face of climate change.

Dr. Shlosberg’s lab in the Department of Chemistry at Ariel University continues his interest in inventing clean energy biotechnologies, with plans to develop bio-fuel cells that will produce electricity and hydrogen fuel while decreasing carbon emissions, to use 3D printing to create a variety of devices for pathogen detection, anddesign plastic antibodies that could target pathogens, sickle cell anemia, and cancer cells.

Dr. Vardi’s PhD in Computer Science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was about temporal logic and automata theory. His first postdoc, in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Weizmann, Dr. Vardi focused on depth separations in neural networks, as well as on implicit bias. His second postdoc was part of the National Science Foundation-Simons Research Collaboration on the Theoretical Foundations of Deep Learning, which he did with the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and Hebrew University’s School of Computer Science and Engineering. Dr. Vardi continued his work on implicit bias, as well as expanding to new topics such as benign overfitting.

Dr. Weiss’ lab at Tel Aviv University’s Biomedical Engineering department works on developing a targeted nanoparticles therapeutic approach for cardiovascular diseases such as thoracic aortic aneurysms that progress to rupture of the aortic wall, a significant cause of mortality worldwide.