Yosef Shiloh

Dr. Yosef Shiloh heads the Myers Laboratory for Cancer Genetics at the Department of Human Molecular genetics and Biochemistry. He obtained his Ph.D. in Human Genetics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and trained further at Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan, New York University Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University in New York, and was a Fogarty Fellow at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He is a member of The Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities and won the 2005 EMET Prize in Life Sciences, the 2011 American Association of Cancer Research G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Cancer Research, the 2011 Israel Prize in Life Sciences and the 2015 Olav Thon Prize in Natural Sciences and Medicine (Oslo, Norway). He has dedicated most of his scientific career to understanding a rare, devastating genetic disorder called ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). He began his work on A-T while working on his Ph.D. thesis and this quest culminated in 1995 in the identification of the responsible gene, ATM, in his lab. The lab has since been studying the function and mode of action of the ATM gene product – the ATM protein, while continuing its quest to understand A-T. In addition to his research, he gives popular scientific lectures to the general public on the medical, social and ethical implications of the genome revolution. He is married to Prof. Shoshana Shiloh of Tel Aviv University's School of Psychological Sciences and they have two children and two grandchildren.