Professor Yosef Shiloh was born in Haifa in 1949. He received his training in human genetics and cancer research at The Technion in Haifa and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This year (2005-2006) he is a Fogarty Scholar in the Human Genome Research Institute at the U.S. National Institute of Health.
His permanent position is in the Department of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine at the Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, where he is incumbent of the David and Inez Myers Chair in Cancer Genetics and head of the Myers Laboratory for Genetic Research. He is a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a member of numerous international organisations, among them the European Molecular Biology Organisation and the Human Genome Organisation.
For almost 30 years Prof. Shiloh has been investigating the response of mammalian cells to damage caused to the DNA by environmental agents such as radiation and carcinogenic chemicals. From the time he was a doctoral student he has focused his work on the devastating human genetic disorder Ataxia-Telangiectasia (A-T). This disease is caused by a defect in responding to radiation damage to the DNA. The defective gene in this disease was identified in his laboratory in 1995, a discovery that paved the way for a series of investigations on the cellular response to radiation damage, carried out in his and many other laboratories around the world.
His work has earned him many awards and honors, including Teva’s Founders Prize and fellowships from the American Cancer Society.
