Nir Ben-Tal

Prof. Nir Ben-Tal is a Computational Structural Biologist, with particular interest in how proteins emerged and evolve. His research combines methods development and application. The Ben-Tal’s laboratory (http://bental.tau.ac.il) has been developing the ConSurf methodology and web-server for the detection of interaction regions in proteins based on evolutionary information (http://consurf.tau.ac.il/), jointly with the Mayrose and Pupko laboratories. The laboratory has also developed methods for prediction of structure and motion in membrane proteins and studied selected proteins including human copper transporter 1, the ATP7b copper ATPase, sodium/proton exchangers. Recently, the laboratory also started to conduct virtual screening for drug-like compounds with selected protein targets Prof. Ben-Tal completed his bachelor degree in Biology, Chemistry and Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1988, and his DSc in Chemistry at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1993. He did his postdoctoral training in Biophysical Chemistry at Columbia University, New York. In 1997 he accepted a faculty position at the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Tel Aviv University, and became full professor in 2007. He co-authored 139 peer-reviewed publications with 12674 citations (h-index=56, google scholar, April 24, 2018). In 2010 he co-authored the textbook “Introduction to Proteins: Structure, Function and Motion”, jointly with Dr. Amit Kessel; a second edition came out in April 2018. He is a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals, including PLoS Computational Biology and eLIFE.