Personal statement: 

I spend as much time outdoors as I can climbing, hiking, diving, and generally taking any chance for an outdoors adventure. 

Research statement:

Antibodies achieve extraordinary sequence diversity, yet the heavy and light variable domains must still meet at a structurally compatible interface for the receptor to be expressed and to function. My research asks how B-cell repertoire selection sustains that balance: which constraints preserve VH–VL interface compatibility, and at which biological scales do they operate?

Most existing work defines the interface geometrically residues that happen to sit close together, and collapses all antibodies into a single consensus. 

The residual is not noise. Much of it reflects V-gene-specific solutions different amino acids preserving the same physical contact and my central goal is to determine what fraction remains genuinely unexplained once conservative substitution and germline identity are accounted for.

Projects:

• Structural constraints at the VH–VL interface: In collaboration with the Kosloff laboratory, defining cross-chain interactions through per-residue energy decomposition and expert curation rather than distance thresholds alone resolving which contacts energetically carry the interface. These definitions are then applied at repertoire scale to classify interface positions as universally constrained, conservatively variable, or V-gene-dependent.

• Nucleotide-level constraints: Testing whether codon usage and AID hotspot/coldspot targeting differ systematically at interface-encoding positions, using a somatic hypermutation aware null rather than a neutral synonymous baseline,  asking whether interface preservation is reinforced at the DNA level.

•Integrated predictive framework: Combining structural neighborhood features, nucleotide-level signatures, and germline identity in graph neural network and Bayesian models, to extend interface discovery to CDR3-proximal and antigen-adjacent positions that resist consensus-based description.

Publications:

•  Wisal Sawaed, Ahmad Dallasheh, Sivan Eliyahu, Nura Aburomi, Aviad Sivan, Marina Kurtz, Michael Assa, Assaf Malka, Shira Perez, Ron Piran. (2026). Markers Predicting Cure with Combinatorial Treatment in a Mouse Model of Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults. MedComm, 7, e70813. https://doi.org/10.1002/mco2.70813
• Peretz, S., Kurtz, M., Sivan, A., Blum, A. (2025). Genetic Links Between Depression and Heart Disease in Women. Israel Medical Association Journal (IMAJ).
• Bhattacharya, M., Sivan, A., Baum, G. (2025). Non-Optimal Codon Usage Shapes Cell Cycle Regulators: Codon Optimization Studies on CDK1 and NUF2. bioRxiv.
• Sivan, A., Rahimi, O., Lavi, B., Salmon-Divon, M., Weiss, E., Drori, E. (2021). Genomic evidence supports an independent history of Levantine and Eurasian grapevines. Plants, People, Planet.
• Carmi, G., Tagore, S., Gorinstein, M., Sivan, A., Eichen, Z., Cohen, N., Lavi, E., De Lorenzis, G., Grassi, F., Drori, E., Hershberg, U. (2020). Design principles of gene evolution for niche adaptation through changes in protein–protein interaction networks. Scientific Reports.