Shai was born in Israel and raised in Montreal, Canada. After his high school studies, he returned with his family to Israel where he completed his bachelor’s degree at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, prior his military services at the air force’s Flight academy. He then served in the army as a medical research officer at the Medical Corps (Sheba Medical center), during which he also started his PhD studies in physiology and pharmacology at Tel Aviv University’s faculty of Medicine, under the supervision of Prof. Dascal N. He moved to the USA for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley (USA) in Neurosciences, where he studied NMDARs and developed novel optogenetic and optical tools for studying synaptic plasticity under the supervision of Prof. Isacoff EY. During 2016, Shai was recruited to the Neuroscience Department at the Rappaport faculty of Medicine at the Technion (Israel). His lab continues to study NMDARs and their implication in disease using electrophysiology, advanced imaging techniques (2-photon and digital holography) and high throughput screening methods. In parallel, his lab merges biology and chemistry to develop novel optical tools for light microscopy and MRI; funded by the European Research council starting grant.
Dr. Shai Berlin
Faculty:Medicine
