Yael Mandel-Gutfreund was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel in 1966. She is a professor at the faculty of Biology at the Technion, Israel Institute for Technology. Yael is currently serving as the Dean of the Faculty of Biology. She received her B.Sc. (1990) M.Sc. (1992) and Ph.D. (1999) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Yael conducted her Postdoctoral research at the University of Santa Cruz California (UCSC). Since 2004 Yael is a principal investigator at the Technion, leading a Computational and Molecular Biology laboratory. During her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Hanah Margalit Yael opened a new research direction in bioinformatics towards reveling the principles of protein-nucleic acid recognition. Her Ph.D. focused on finding the code for recognition between transcription factors and DNA and is considered among the milestones in the field. As a postdoctoral fellow Yael was among the first to employ machine learning approaches for predicting protein functions, specifically of nucleic acid binding proteins. In her laboratory at the Technion Yael develops computational approaches to study gene expression regulation. Her group developed dedicated web servers for mapping and predicting RNA and DNA binding sites and discovering novel nucleic acid binding proteins. Several years ago, Yael established a new experimental laboratory. The main research direction in her new experimental laboratory is to study co-regulation between transcriptional and post-transcriptional pathways in human Embryonic Stem Cells (hESCs). In her lab they are currently developing and employing state-of-the art technologies for detecting multifunctional proteins which bind DNA and RNA (specifically long non-coding RNAs) and discovering the roles of their interactions in pluripotency, differentiation and in viral infections.
Faculty:Biology
