Scholar Profile
As an adolescent, Lidor Shaar-Moshe aspired to become a doctor until she spent time working in the fields of Kibbutz Nirim. There, she became fascinated by the extensive expertise and resources required for massive food production. She was motivated to join the scientific community devoted to ensuring global food security after a trip to rural Ethiopia, where she saw the contrast between agricultural practices in developed and developing countries.
Dr. Shaar-Moshe’s new lab in the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology at the University of Haifa researches how plant physiology and development are affected by unfavorable and dynamic environments, and what mechanisms allow plants to thrive under such conditions. While studies on stress response have traditionally focused on the organ or whole-plant scales, her lab will focus on cellular and tissue-level responses, capitalizing on recent technological advances that reveal the fundamental role of these scales in initiating and mediating stress responses.
Her PhD at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment provided new insights into how plants utilize developmental plasticity as an adaptive mechanism to multiple concurrent abiotic (non-living) stress factors, such as salinity, drought, and heat stress.
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. She investigated the possibility of harnessing the salt tolerance of wild tomatoes to enhance this tolerance in domesticated tomatoes.
Dr. Shaar-Moshe’s lab has been awarded generous multi-year funding from the United States‑Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD).
The overarching goal of Dr. Shaar-Moshe’s lab is to improve plant production and human health by enhancing cellular functions, using imaging techniques complemented by single-cell transcriptomics, genetic assays, physiological analyses, and targeted genomic editing for functional validations. Her findings could enhance crop productivity and agricultural sustainability in the face of climate change.