Personal statement: 

I like to read, spend time with my family and my friends, and take a walk in nature.

Research statement:

My research focuses on the non-coding “instruction manual” of our adaptive immune system. While most studies look at the genes that directly build antibodies, I investigate the hidden regulatory elements (like Recombination Signal Sequences and leader sequences) that control how these genes are assembled. My goal is to understand these fundamental questions: How have these non-coding instructions evolved over millions of years across species? And how do natural variations in these sequences predict which immune cells will successfully develop?

Projects:

• Evolutionary Immunology: Comparing human and primate immunogobulin regions to discover how the non-coding “instructions” of our immune system have evolved over millions of years.

• Predictive Recombination Models: Developing computational scoring models to predict how specific combinations of V, D, and J regulatory sequences determine the functional success of an immune cell.

Publications and presentations:

• 2023 Arthaton – participation as a research student in the field.
• DSRC – Data Science Poster Day
• 21st Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium (IBS2023)
• Israeli, O.; Guedj-Dana, Y.; Shifman, O.; Lazar, S.; Cohen-Gihon, I.; Amit, S.; Ben-Ami, R.; Paran, N.; Schuster, O.; Weiss, S.; et al. Rapid Amplicon Nanopore Sequencing (RANS) for the Differential Diagnosis of Monkeypox Virus and Other Vesicle-Forming Pathogens. Viruses 2022, 14, 1817. https://doi.org/10.3390/v14081817
• Guedj-Dana Y, Cohen-Gihon I, Israeli O, Shifman O, Aminov T, Rotem S, Ber R, Zvi A. Whole genome sequencing and taxonomic profiling of two Pantoea sp. isolated from environmental samples in Israel. BMC Genom Data. 2022 Apr 21;23(1):31. doi: 10.1186/s12863-022-01049-7. PMID: 35448968; PMCID: PMC9022320.