Meet Assistant Professor Shira Landau

Asst. Prof. Shira Landau joined the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering last October, after returning from a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. “I felt that I was coming home,” she says—referring not only to Israel but to the Technion. In fact, before moving to Toronto, Landau spent 12 years at the Technion, from 2008 to 2020, completing three degrees. She lived on campus the entire time, first alone, then with her husband, who was also a Technion student, and later with their three children, who were born when she was a master’s and doctoral student.

In addition to feeling at home at the Technion, Dr. Landau decided to return to her alma mater because of its outstanding students. “This is an important factor for my research, since I need excellent students to work in my lab,” she notes. Another reason for returning to the Technion was the proximity to her long-time mentor, Prof. Shulamit Levenberg. At the end of her bachelor’s studies, Landau was selected to join Levenberg’s prestigious Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering Laboratory, and Levenberg became her PhD supervisor. “Still today, she’s always there for me and always helps.”

Landau’s doctoral research examined external forces on the formation of vascularized constructs (3D-engineered tissues). During her postdoctoral training, she expanded this work to human organ-on-chip platforms with a particular emphasis on vascularized cardiac tissues and immune integration. “We studied the effect of adding cells from the immune system into these tissues and tried creating vascularized cardiac tissues,” she explains.

In her new lab at the Technion, Shira plans to create a chip that combines functional cardiac tissue and functional blood vessels in the same chip. “That’s a big challenge,” she admits. “These chips could then be used to research mechanisms. For example, it would be possible to simulate heart attacks and see how the cells react in both healthy and diseased states.” Landau’s approach is innovative since she doesn’t use live animals, unlike most other researchers.

She is also interested in exploring the connection between cardiac tissue and other organs – particularly in the context of women’s health. “I’m interested in studying cardiac-placenta interactions. For example, certain diseases affect pregnant women around the time of delivery, often causing their bodies’ systems to shut down. If we create a chip that has cardiac tissue on one side and placental tissue on the other, we could study their interaction both in healthy and in diseased states. This can provide insight into the disease’s mechanism,” she elaborates, adding that “today not much is known about the connection between the heart and placenta, and mice aren’t necessarily similar to humans. Our lab’s advantage is that we use human cells.”

In the future, she also plans to research the connection between heart disease and cancer. Ultimately, the research carried out in her lab could help develop drugs for treating certain diseases.

Landau received a generous grant from Beresheet, an Israeli government and ISF program that encourages outstanding postdoctoral researchers to move back to Israel and join an academic research institution. In addition to an extensive research grant, awardees receive a personal absorption grant for five years as well as funding for lab equipment. This grant is helping Shira build her new lab, which includes equipment such as an expensive microscope and 3D printer, as well as biological elements and other materials.

So far, Shira Landau is happy to be back at the Technion, even though it is very different and challenging to be a faculty member rather than a student. In addition to the fact that she has many friends on campus, she credits much of her successful absorption to the Technion’s mentoring program for new faculty, which she finds very helpful.

This article originally appeared in the Technion President’s Report 2026. The full report is available here.