Dr. Amir Aharoni, a senior lecturer in the Department of Life Sciences and a member of the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev (NIBN), has been awarded a European Research Council IDEAS grant.
The IDEAs program is designed to provide major support to the best of the brightest. The program for Young Researchers (up to 8 years since Ph.D.), identifies the 300 individuals who seemed to have the greatest potential for impacting on European science in the decades ahead. More than 9000 applications were submitted and, 300 were approved.
The topic of Aharoni's proposal was: Protein engineering for the study of specificity in biological systems.
Dr. Aharoni noted: "During the past few years, as a post doctoral fellow, I have successfully developed and applied directed evolution methodologies for the study of different enzymes. My future goals are to further implement directed evolution as a tool to study proteins structure, function and evolution. In my view, a promising field for research is the study of multi specific enzymes and their biochemical and physiological roles."
Aharoni did his doctorate and post doctoral work at the Weizmann Institute of Science and at the University of British Columbia, Canada. A recipient of the prestigious Legacy Heritage Fund and the Alon Fellowship Award for 2007, his research focuses on protein engineering using directed evolution technologies to allow for the development of proteins with new functions.