Month: August 2018

The first prize final project at the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering conference

With a cellphone app to predict and diagnose atrial fibrillation, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology students Noam Keidar and Gal Eidelstein won first prize at the recently held Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering Final Project Exhibit Competition. The project was mentored by Assistant Professor Yael Yaniv of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering.

Atrial fibrillation is a dangerous heart disorder treated with a defibrillator, a device found today in many public areas. Immediate treatment of atrial fibrillation can save approximately 90% of patients, but each minute that passes after the event lowers the survival rate by approximately 10%, making early or immediate diagnosis critical.

The student-developed app predicts events at least 4 minutes in advance – with a 100% prediction rate. Such a warning enables early referral of the patient for medical assistance or treatment with a defibrillator. The app is based on recordings of the electrical activity of the heart (ECG) of many healthy people and deep learning (stratified neuronal networks). In addition to the life-saving and clinical damage-prevention potential of this app, the system is expected to provide the research community with extensive information about the evolvement of atrial fibrillation.

The novel project was recently presented at the Technion’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering Final Projects Exhibit. The exhibit displayed 23 projects of fourth-year, undergraduate students at the faculty. The projects involved are in three main disciplines: (1) imaging and medical signal processing, (2) biomechanics and (3) flow, biomaterials and tissue engineering.

Associate Professor Amir Landesberg, who has spearheaded the exhibit for the past few years, presented the dramatic global biomedical engineering trends. He noted that approximately $2 billion is invested each year in Israel alone and that the annual growth rate in this field stands at approximately 7%.

“To date, our Faculty has 1,108 graduates, 96% of whom work in the field and approximately 13% of whom are senior managers in industry,” said Landesberg. “Biomedical engineering is an essential element of future medicine – predictive, preventative, personalized and precise medicine.”

Other top prizes during the exhibition sponsored by Dr. Doron and Liat Adler were:

Second prize was awarded to Shunit Polinsky, who developed a user interface for a printed robotic hand, under the guidance of Dr. Yoav Medan and Yair Herbst of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and the nonprofit organization Haifa D3, which engages in the development of low-cost, personalized bionic hands. Polinsky developed a lightweight, rotating hand, which can be actuated by a healthy leg or hand. Use of the robotic hand is intuitive and enables a broad range of movements, including holding a disposable cup filled with water. The price of the hand is estimated at approximately 100 dollars while existing bionic hands cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Noah Michael and Zemach Bar-Mocha won third place for their project on degradable scaffolds for spinal cord injuries, prepared using 3D printing and freeze-drying. The students developed a degradable polymeric scaffold suitable for treatment of injured spinal cords. The scaffold was fabricated by 3D printing, can be tailored to patient specifications and the implant is integrated relatively rapidly into the spinal cord. The project was directed by Ben Kaplan from the laboratory of Professor Shulamit Levenberg of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering.

The “Audience’s favorite” Prize was awarded to Nofar Azoulay and Eyal Habif, who developed a platform for drug transfer via artificial saliva, a work mentored by Shani Elias Krema from the laboratory of Associate Professor Josue Sznitman of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering.

 

HAIFA, ISRAEL (August 22, 2018) – Dr. Kira Radinsky and Shahar Harel of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Computer Science Department have developed a smart system for the development of new drugs. Founded on artificial intelligence and deep learning, the system is expected to dramatically shorten and reduce the costs of drug development. It will be presented this week during the KDD 2018 conference in London.

Drug production is a costly and lengthy process. How costly and lengthy? Costs of half a billion to 2.5 billion dollars per drug, over 10-15 years are common numbers in the world of pharmacology.

In the past, new drugs were serendipitously discovered, with the discovery of penicillin being the most famous example. But modern-day processes are computerized and more systematic, beginning with a screen of many molecules and selection of those that have the greatest therapeutic potential.

The problem is that between 1023  and 1060 molecules show therapeutic potential. In comparison, there are an estimated 1022 stars in the galaxy. Therefore, the development process is typically shortened by narrowing down the initial breadth to molecules that feature the desired properties, which still leaves an enormous number of molecules.

In the study that will be presented at KDD 2018, the Technion researchers formulated a new approach for the generation of therapeutic molecule candidates. According to Shahar Harel, their working hypothesis is that “the drug development-related organic chemistry vocabulary is similar to that of a natural language. The system that we developed, which uses artificial intelligence and deep learning, acquired this language based on hundreds of thousands of molecules. In addition, we supplied it with the chemical composition of all drugs approved up until 1950, which served as the prototypes upon which it generated new variations – new potential drugs. In order to generate a creative system, we deliberately introduced “noise”, which yields diversity. Namely, the system will generate many variations of existing drugs.”

Thus, the system is based on a pharmacological language, data on existing drugs and a creativity-promoting mechanism. When they instructed the system to propose 1000 drugs based upon old drugs, the researchers were surprised to discover that 35 of the new drugs generated by the system are existing, FDA-approved drugs developed and approved after 1950. In other words, the investigators demonstrated the system’s efficiency in developing ‘rational’ or valid drugs.

“We are essentially presenting here an algorithm which addresses the creative stage of drug development – the molecule discovery stage,” said Harel. “This capacity leans upon our mathematical innovation, which enables the computer to understand the chemical language and to generate new molecules based upon a prototype.”

According to Dr. Radinsky, “What we’ve presented here is not only a means of streamlining existing methods, but also entirely new drug development and scientific practice paradigms. Instead of seeking out specific correlations based upon hypotheses we formulate, we allow the computer to identify these connections from within a massive sample size, without guidance. The computer is not smarter than man, but it can cope with huge amounts of data and find unexpected correlations. This is how we managed to find (in another study) the unknown side effects of various drugs and drug combinations, and now, an innovative drug development mechanism. This is a novel type of science which is not built upon hypotheses tested in an experiment, rather, upon data that generated the research hypothesis.”

The significance of this breakthrough is particularly great in the face of Eroom’s Law, which asserts that the number of new drugs approved by the FDA should decline at a rate of approximately 50% every 9 years (ratio between the number of new drugs and the investment in research and development). The term Eroom was coined in 2012 in an article published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, and is a reverse order of Moore, the name of Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel. Moore observed that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years. In contrast, Eroom’s Law notes that each year, fewer and fewer drugs are marketed.

Dr. Radinksy projects that “this new development will accelerate and reduce costs of development of new and effective drugs, thereby shortening the time patients will have to wait for the drugs. In addition, this breakthrough is expected to lead to the development of drugs that would not have been generated with the conventional pharmacological paradigm.”

Technion Researchers Use Bacteria to Cure Fungal Infections

HAIFA, ISRAEL (August 19, 2018) – Researchers in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering have cured fungal infections using a soil-dwelling bacteria. The findings of the research led by Assistant Professor Boaz Mizrahi and conducted by his student Maayan Lupton and Dr. Ayelet Orbach were published recently in Advanced Functional Materials.

Fungal infections are common among various animals, including humans. One of the primary sources of such infections is Candida – a yeast regularly found in our bodies. Candida exploits abnormal functioning in the organism to spread and harm the host. Most people will experience a fungal infection at least once in their lifetime, in some part of their body – on the skin, in the digestive system or genitals.

The frequency of fungal infections is constantly on the rise due to the aging population and possibly global warming. Additional reasons include the use of drugs, which suppress the immune system, and the increased use of broad-spectrum antibiotics, which indirectly enhance the proliferation of Candida by disrupting the bacteria balance in the body.

Oral antifungal drugs administered today are associated with low efficacy, a spectrum of side effects, such as headaches and rash, and in certain cases, with life-threatening liver and kidney toxicities. In addition, Candida strains resistant to existing drugs have already been discovered.

The researchers assessed the possibility of treating Candida via the Bacillus subtilis bacterium, which naturally produces and secretes substances that inhibit Candida growth. This mechanism evolved in the bacteria as part of its competition with Candida over common growth substrates.

“Our first challenge,” said Assistant Professor Mizrahi, “was to develop a transport system that would enable application of the live bacteria on the infected lesion without impairing their ability to proliferate and secrete their therapeutic substances in the target site.”

To do so, the researchers developed a unique gel that is in liquid form in the refrigerator and at room temperature (enabling easy application on the skin), but which hardens within seconds after being applied to the skin. Beside the thermo-responsive polymers, the gel contains food substances, which ensure maintained bacterial viability on the skin, where they can “treat” the infection.

The researchers applied the gel on the skin of mice suffering from a fungal infection, after marking it (the gel) with a fluorescent substance that would allow for monitoring. The formulation penetrated deep into the skin but not into the underlying blood vessels, implying that the effect of the formula is limited to the diseased area. Later, the clinical efficacy of the bacterial formulation was demonstrated on mice suffering from Candida infection. In the control groups – treated with bacteria-free gel or not treated at all – the infection continued to develop, but the group treated with the Technion-developed bacterial gel showed rapid skin healing. Moreover, comparison of the novel treatment to the commonly used ketoconazole demonstrated the superiority of the Technion gel both from the clinically and the safety point of views.

The researchers noted that aside from development of the unique gel, a new therapeutic treatment model was demonstrated here: a minuscule factory, which after its penetration into the target, begins to produce the active substance. This is in contrast to the standard pharmaceutical model, in which the drug passes through the entire body and portions of it may be broken down in the process. The researchers hope that their novel model will be used in the future to treat a range of diseases, including psoriasis, acne, various inflammations and even cancer.

In addition to his position in the Technion Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, Assistant Professor Boaz Mizrahi is a member of the Technion’s Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute and Lorry I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering.

 

 

 

 

The Technion continues to lead Israel’s academia

Climbs to 77th place in the list of the world’s best academic institutions

The Technion and Hebrew University (95th place) are Israel’s two representatives in the top 100 of the 2018 Shanghai Ranking  

The Technion jumped to 77th place in the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) – the best ranking for an Israeli university this year.  The Shanghai list is the world’s leading ranking of institutions of higher education. This year’s top 100 also included the Hebrew University, in 95th place.

Since 2012, the Technion has been consistently included in the ARWU’s top 100 and has now returned to the 77th place, where it was positioned in 2015.

Technion President Professor Peretz Lavie said that “the Technion’s presence in the top 100 leading universities worldwide over the past 7 consecutive years is the fruit of the hard and dedicated work of the Technion management, faculty members, and employees. We carefully select our faculty members with excellence being the single criterion. To tighten the Technion’s position as a world-leading science-technology research university, we also act on the global front – a strategy which has brought about the creation of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute (JCTI) in New York and the Guangdong – Technion-Israel Institute of Technology (GTIIT) in China.

Irrespective of the international ranking, we continuously appraise and improve ourselves, but the high Shanghai ranking provides an exciting international stamp of recognition of the Technion’s excellence.”

This year, for the second time, the Shanghai ranking also included a disciplinary ranking – ranking by research subject. In this ranking as well, published on July 17, the Technion starred in several categories. The Technion ranked first place among Israeli universities in several fields: Space Engineering (22nd place in the world), Automation and Control (30), Chemistry (group range 51-57) and Transportation Science and Engineering (group range 51-75).

The Shanghai ranking, which has been published since 2003, evaluates institutions around the world using objective criteria, including the number of Nobel Prize laureates and winners of other prestigious prizes, the number of scientific publications in the leading journals Nature and Science and other performance indicators relative to the size of the university. The comprehensive Chinese research covers 1200 universities, of which 500 are selected as leading universities.  

For the full ranking:  http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2018.html

 

 

Researchers Break Through Intel SGX, Intel’s Security Wall

HAIFA, ISRAEL (August 15, 2018) – Technion-Israel Institute of Technology researchers and their colleagues abroad have broken through Intel’s innovative security wall, Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX). SGX is a recently introduced security feature of Intel processors for protecting the privacy and integrity of information and applications on the computer. It is available in all recent Intel processors and is broadly deployed in both personal computers and cloud computing services.

The attack, dubbed Foreshadow, exploits certain weaknesses in the existing mechanisms of Intel CPUs, allowing an attacker to expose private application data and forge computations secured by SGX.

The researchers reported Foreshadow to Intel in January of 2018. Further analysis into the causes of Foreshadow performed by Intel revealed that the same hardware flaw enables a number of other devastating attacks. Called Foreshadow –NG, these attacks put in risk the privacy of users of cloud computing systems that use Intel CPUs. The patches that mitigate these attacks have already been released.

The researchers from the Technion are Assistant Prof. Mark Silberstein of the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering and his graduate student Marina Minkin from the Computer Science Department. They conducted the study together with their colleagues from The University of Adelaide (Australia), The University of Michigan (USA) and KU Leuven (Belgium). Former Technion graduates Ophir Weiss and Assistant Prof. Daniel Genkin were also involved in the research. The team’s work will be presented today (August 15, 2018) at the leading security conference, USENIX Security ’18, in Baltimore, Maryland.

SGX is a revolutionary hardware technology that enables the creation of secure execution environments, called secure enclaves. According to Prof. Silberstein, SGX has a wide range of potential applications. “Let’s say a company such as Netflix is interested in guaranteeing that its customers may watch movies only via Netflix’s own video streaming application to prevent illegal copies of the streamed contents. How to ensure that the client does not hack into the application, dumps its memory, or replaces it with a reverse-engineered version, given that the computer is entirely under her control?”

With SGX, Netflix servers can verify that the client application is invoked in a secure enclave that runs genuine Netflix software, and only then start transferring the movie. Moreover, SGX automatically encrypts all the information in the enclave’s memory with a unique key hardware-protected key. “This way, only the Netflix client, and no other applications on the computer, not even a computer administrator, may access the movie in the computer’s memory, as long as the processor hardware itself is not compromised.” SGX is also useful for cloud computing systems that rent remote computers by the hour because SGX allows their users to trust the computations performed on remote cloud computers as if they were their own.  Therefore, leading cloud computing vendors including IBM, Google, and Microsoft have already announced products that rely on SGX.
But the Foreshadow attack breaks these essential SGX security guarantees.

Researchers managed to read all the information stored in the enclave – the information that the user assumes is confidential. Moreover, Foreshadow compromised the secure storage mechanisms upon which the mechanism for validating the authenticity of a remote enclave is built, enabling the researchers to forge the programs running in the enclave. In other words, Foreshadow compromises core security guarantees provided by SGX, toppling large part of the entire SGX ecosystem by exploiting a single critical hardware vulnerability.

Dr. Daniel Genkin and Dr. Yuval Yarom, two of the researchers who discovered Foreshadow, were also involved in the discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities that rocked the world in January 2018. That disclosure required Intel to distribute security updates to about 90% of the processors it had sold over the past five years. Foreshadow is a Meltdown-style attack too – the first such attack on Intel SGX.

The current study is supported by the Technion Hiroshi Fujiwara Cyber Security Research Center (Prof. Silberstein is the head of Center’s Scientific Committee), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Department of Commerce, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the Ariane de Rothschild Women Doctoral Program, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

 

 

Technion alumni star among the “Israeli Hottest Start-ups of 2018” list published in The Marker

In July, The Marker published a list of Israel’s hottest start-ups of 2018 – 20 innovative companies which are expected to shape the future.  Technion alumni fill senior positions in about 50% of the selected companies.

Tom Livneh, a Technion International-MBA program graduate, is the CEO and founder of VerbIT AI, a company that developed low-cost and rapid automatic transcription services.  The VerbIT platform combines original algorithms, a speech-identification engine and thousands of human transcribers, who improve algorithm performance.

Asaf Yigal, a Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering graduate, is one of the founders of Logz.io, which developed a technology that enables collection of large amounts of data, then used to perform complex analyses, presented in graphical and user-friendly formats.

Elram Goren, a graduate of the Faculties of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Technion, is the CEO and founder of CommonSense Robotics, a company that develops programs and mini-robots for smart storage room management. This technology enables retailers to provide quick and effective deliveries to the client, without high manpower demands.

Eilon Reshef, a Faculty of Computer Science Technion alumnus who participated in the Technion’s Rothschild program for outstanding students, is the co-founder of Gong.io and manages the company’s technology. Gong developed a technology to improve the performance of sales people and organizations.  The technology performs a computerized analysis of sales conversations and provides organizations with essential information from these calls – whether the product was presented properly, what the client was hesitant about, etc.

Eli Cohen, a Technion Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty alumnus, is a co-founder and VP of Donde Search – a company that develops search technologies that will enable fashion companies to identify trends, understand customer desires and provide them with personalized and focused recommendations.

Ido Priel, who earned an MSc in Systems Engineering at the Technion, is the co-founder and chief product manager at Space Pharma, a company that developed a platform for performing experiments in outer space. The mini-lab is launched to outer space and experiments can be remotely controlled. To date, the company has launched two such labs.

Dr. Yaniv Altshuler, who earned all of his advanced degrees at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion, is the co-founder and CEO of Endor, a platform which enables decision-makers to predict consumer behavior using an automatic prediction engine.

Several Technion alumni are in the Jacada corporate management team: directorate member Haim Shani, a Davidson Industrial Engineering and Management alumnus, Yoel Goldenberg, an Industrial Engineering and Management alumnus, and Jacques Tchenio, VP of Sales, who earned his MSc at the Faculty of Mathematics.

Yosef Bert, of blessed memory, was a Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering alumnus, is the founder of Silentium, a company that is currently managed to Yoel Naor, developed an innovative noise-reduction technology for offices, bedrooms, and others. Currently, it is primarily used in the context of reduction of noises in the car.

The late Rami Feig, a Technion alumnus, was the founder of Hailo, which develops dedicated chips for artificial intelligence and big-data applications. The processor that the company is developing, will run artificial intelligence applications in connected computers, in drones, smart homes, and others. The late Avi Baum, the cofounder and chief technology manager at the company, is a Technion graduate, as is the serial entrepreneur Zohar Zisapel. Feig, Baum and Zisapel are Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering graduates.

 

German and Israeli supercomputers spend 100 weeks crunching astronomical numbers

The Moon is Earth’s only natural satellite, and its creation still raises many questions for astrophysical research. Indeed, the Moon may not have been alone in the skies of primeval Earth. Recent studies have shown that there were once a number of smaller moons – known as moonlets – but where they came from is a mystery.

Working with Dr. Uri Malamud and Professor Hagai Perets of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and Christoph Burger of the University of Vienna, University of Tübingen’s Dr. Christoph Schäfer has been investigating to find out what happened to Earth’s moonlets. The researchers’ complex simulations show that they could have fallen to Earth in collisions that changed the composition of Earth’s mantle. Their findings are published in the latest edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

According to the currently accepted theory, the Moon was created some 4.5 billion years ago in a collision between the proto-Earth and another proto-planet the size of Mars. Astrophysicists call this proto-planet Theia. That led to the formation of a disc around the Earth, composed of material thrown out of both bodies by the collision. The material in the disc eventually conglomerated into the Moon we know today.

But the latest research shows that the Earth was subject to not one, but several such major collisions; and that smaller bodies hit the proto-Earth even more frequently. These processes led to the formation of several moonlets, which the researchers have assumed to have each been between one-sixth and half of the Moon’s mass.

The Technion-Vienna-Tubingen team has been investigating the fate of those moonlets. “There are three possibilities: The moonlets may have joined up under the force of gravity to form larger objects (and eventually these mergers formed the moon), some of these moonlets interacted gravitationally and were ejected from the Earth’s gravitational pull, or – the third possibility – they may have been pulled back down to the Earth,” Dr. Christoph Schäfer explained. “Those are the three options we are looking at and in this paper we are investigating the third one.”

To simulate the collisions of the moonlets with the Earth, the researchers used a computer program developed under Dr. Schäfer’s direction at the Tübingen Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics by Professor Wilhelm Kley’s working group. The calculations themselves were conducted in the Tübingen BinAC computer cluster and the TAMNUN cluster in Israel. The Tübingen physicists’ program used smooth particle hydrodynamics to model the processes, and graphics processing units to accelerate the highly complex computations. Christoph Burger of the Vienna University Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics wrote the code for the complicated initial conditions for the simulations.

100 weeks of calculation time

The astrophysicists assumed a simplified model of the proto-Earth and a falling moonlet, in which both had an iron core and a silicate mantle. Their fractions were assumed identical to the present day values. The group carried out more than 70 simulations of a moonlet colliding with the Earth, varying parameters such as the angle of impact, the size of the moonlet, and the rotational velocity of the Earth. “In total, the calculations took more than 100 weeks of computing time,” said Dr. Uri Malamud, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Astrophysics Group.

In Haifa, Dr. Malamud analyzed the results of the simulations. He determined which fragments of the bodies would have been able to escape from the system, which would have entered a captured orbit around the Earth, and which would remain after hitting the Earth. He also calculated the change in the Earth’s rotation period caused by the collision.

“Our results show that when a moonlet strikes the Earth, the incoming material is not homogeneously distributed. This kind of collision can therefore lead to asymmetries and inhomogenities in the composition of the Earth’s mantle,” said Dr. Malamud. “This collaborative research gives us a more complete picture of how the Moon was created and places it into the broader context of planetary formation in the solar system.”

Technion researchers discovered a mechanism underlying plant adaptation to changes in nutrient availability in its environment

In findings published this week in Developmental Cell, researchers in the Technion Faculty of Biology present an explanation for root capacity to adjust their growth in response to changes in the availability of minerals essential to plant nutrition.

The research was led by Dr. Amar Pal Singh, a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Sigal Savaldi-Goldstein’s laboratory, and involved fellow lab members as well as collaborators from the lab of Professor Arnon Henn at the Technion and the ENS Lyon, France.

“Plants are critical to life on Earth and are fascinating organisms to study,” says Prof. Savaldi-Goldstein. “They differ from animals in several aspects. While animals can move and migrate to safer locations, toward water sources and the like, plants are fixed in place. In contrast to animals, plants generate new organs throughout their life and regulate their growth rate in accordance with environmental conditions – which is essential to their survival. During evolution, the plant kingdom developed various strategies to adapt to fluctuating environmental conditions. The root, for example, can accelerate or decelerate its growth and to form new side roots that emerge from it, depending on nutrient availability in the soil.”

Steroid hormones, called brassinosteroids, are critical for plant growth and development. The Technion researchers assessed the activity of brassinosteroids and the proteins they regulate, in the root of the Arabidopsis (a small flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard). They discovered that the proteins in the brassinosteroid pathway are also impacted by signals arising from the nutrient composition in the root environment.

The researchers demonstrated that the mineral composition in the plant growth media (that is, in laboratory conditions) can have contradictory impacts: iron deficiency in the plant environment increases the intensity of the brassinosteroid pathway and thus accelerates root growth, while phosphate deficiency in the environment, which leads to iron accumulation in the root, weakens the brassinosteroid pathway activity, thereby slowing root growth.

The researchers also identified the link between the plant and its environment in these processes – a protein called BKI1. They discovered that this protein – which is known to regulate the steroid pathway – is also affected by environmental conditions; iron deficiency reduces its expression levels, thereby accelerating root growth, while phosphate deficiency increases its expression, leading to slowed root growth. That is, BKI1 sits at an “intersection” between a pathway of an internal origin signal (hormone) and a pathway originating from the environment (nutrient availability).

The researchers also discovered a reverse effect: the intensity of the brassinosteroid pathway affects the amount of iron that is accumulated in the root, which serves as a feedback signal that likely ensures root growth in accordance with environmental conditions.

“We have essentially uncovered a mechanism that links the availability of these two nutrients – phosphate and iron – and the steroid pathway, which together adjust root growth”. Understanding the complexity of plant response to limited mineral availability might assist in the future to improve crop yield while reducing the need for fertilizers.”

From the very start of her research endeavors, Professor Savaldi-Goldstein has been focusing on plants as a great model to study biology. Her lab at the Faculty of Biology at the Technion seeks to understand developmental principles in plants. To this end, she studies the two sources influencing plant growth – namely, the signals coming from within the plant and those coming from its environment. Her work integrates different experimental tools such as live imaging, analysis of gene expression at a cellular level and developmental genetics techniques.