Prof. Erez Levanon

Prof. Erez Levanon is a leading world-renowned researcher in the field of genome research and RNA editing. He has participated in dozens of studies that have been cited thousands of times by researchers in Israel and abroad, and his groundbreaking discoveries have yielded scientific insights that may lead in the coming years to the development of drugs for diseases that are currently incurable. Among other things, Prof. Levanon, together with his partners, has developed methods for identifying RNA editing sites and using this knowledge to develop technologies that may be used in the future to correct mutations.

Prof. Levanon heads a laboratory at the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences. Prof. Levanon's laboratory is a computational laboratory that specializes in the research of RNA editing, a prominent new field of research that gives hope to many patients around the world. Using advanced genetic sequencing technologies with computational tools and bio-informational methods, the scientists at his laboratory study a variety of biological mechanisms related to RNA editing – the process of rewriting the RNA sequence following its transcription from the DNA, which increases the complexity and “flexibility” of genomic information.  In 2016 he won the prestigious ARCHES Award together with Professor Jan Philipp Junker of the Helmholtz Association Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin for their joint research in which they mapped genetic editing sites in zebrafish.

In recent years, Prof. Levanon has been focusing his research on developing technologies and algorithms that will unveil the functions of RNA editing in humans and animals in order to discover how RNA editing mechanisms affect various biological processes, outline their activities in the cells of the nervous system and the brain, and identify their role in the evolution of mammals.

Prof. Levanon holds an MSc degree and a  PhD degree from Tel Aviv University and was a post-PhD researcher at Harvard Medical School. Since 2009, Prof. Levanon has been a staff member at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Life Sciences.