Scholar Profile
After five years of postdoctoral and professional training in the United States in structural biology and immunology, Liron David returned to her native Israel as an Assistant Professor in the Life Sciences Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her multidisciplinary lab employs structural and cellular approaches to investigate how CBM, a complex signalosome linked to NF-kB activation in lymphocytes, directly promotes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma mutations. The lab also investigates Ninjurin immune proteins, which could be promising potential targets for anti-cancer treatments. She hopes eventually to provide new strategies for developing therapeutics for these diseases.
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.