I received my PhD in Medicine from The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. I am interested in how function and order emerge from complex and inherently stochastic living systems, involving multiple interacting components. These systems are often described as biological networks: from neural networks underlying our mental perception and physical action; through regulatory gene networks orchestrating differential gene expression patterns over time and tissues, while all cells are subject to the same genetic content.
The early fruit fly embryo provides a simple, yet, rich example where a regulatory gene network is responsible for structural pattern formation, determining the head-tail axis of a fly within the first few hours of development. My current projects focus on perturbing this network, such that a single node is being eliminated at a time. I Combine high-throughput quantitative measurements of protein expression patterns with computational approaches to gain new insights on different aspects of how this network carries its functions: from writing and decoding of positional information, to probing the network interactions, exploring gene dosage sensitivity, and more.