Prof. Yosef Shiloh Tel Aviv University, Israel

Yossi Shiloh obtained his B.Sc. degree at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and continued his graduate studies in Human Genetics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem for both his M.Sc. and Ph.D. He trained further at Harvard Medical School and the University of Michigan and was a Fogarty... read moreFellow at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He is a member of The Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Yossi has dedicated most of his scientific career to understanding the severe human genetic disorder, ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T), caused by a defect in a central mechanism that maintains the stability and integrity of the DNA. He began his quest to understand this disease while working on his Ph.D. thesis. After numerous biochemical studies, he turned to identifying the elusive A-T gene. Since this was done in the early days of the genome era and genomic technology, this turned out to be a large-scale, labor-intensive endeavor that lasted 8 years and culminated in 1995 in the identification of the gene mutated in A-T patients, the ATM gene. His lab has since been studying the function and mode of action of the ATM protein, the product of the A-T gene, and the complex signaling network that ATM activates in response to DNA damage. In addition to his research, Prof. Shiloh devotes considerable time to giving popular scientific lectures to the general public and high school students on the medical, social and ethical implications of the genome revolution and its effect on cancer research and therapy.