Dr. Einav Tayeb-Fligelman
Watching her beloved grandmother’s decline from Alzheimer’s disease inspired Einav Tayeb-Fligelman to dedicate her career to neurodegenerative diseases. She specializes in protein aggregations in physiology and pathology.
Dr. Tayeb-Fligelman completed her doctorate as well as a short postdoc in the Department of Biology at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. She focused on the structure-function relationships of amyloids and globular proteins, characterizing amyloid structure in various organisms and discovering a previously unknown cross-α amyloid architecture.
Her second postdoc at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA coincided with the COVID pandemic, during which time the school conducted only COVID-related research. Dr. Tayeb-Fligelman embraced the research challenge, working in the Department of Physiology and then in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry to demonstrate amyloid fibril formation by a key viral replication protein and design peptides to combat viral infectivity. Her work was supported by prestigious UCLA and NIH grants, along with postdoctoral fellowships such as the highly competitive Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) fellowship.
In her own lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Life Sciences, Dr. Tayeb-Fligelman investigates tauopathies, a class of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s. Tau proteins are primarily found in neurons, and are crucial for maintaining the cytoskeletal network by aiding in microtubule assembly and stability. When they aggregate into amyloid fibrils and soluble oligomers, they are considered a significant biomarker in various central nervous system disorders. Despite decades of research, the mechanisms driving aggregation remain poorly understood, and effective therapies are lacking.
Dr. Tayeb-Fligelman aims to uncover the structural and biochemical factors contributing to the initiation and progress of tauopathies, potentially laying the groundwork for novel therapeutics. Her use of advanced cryogenic electron microscopy techniques also advances these methods that make it possible to visualize biological complexes at high resolution in the native environment of cells and tissues.