Uri Alon

BIOGRAPHY

EDUCATION:
PhD , theoretical physics -Weizmann Institute
statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics -Weizmann Institute
PhD , theoretical physics -The Weizmann Institute

MEMBERSHIPS/AWARDS: He was promoted to associate professor in 2004 and full professor in 2008. His prizes and honors include the Moore Fellowship, California Institute of Technology (2000), EMBO Young Investigator Award (2001), Minerva Junior Research Group on Biological Computation (2003), Morris L. Levinson Award in Biology, Weizmann Institute Scientific Council (2003), IBM Faculty Award (2003), Overton Prize of the International Society for Computational Biology (2004), Teva Founders Prize (2005) and EMBO membership (2007)

RESEARCH INTERESTS: To understand biological networks, our lab has defined "network motifs": basic interaction patterns that recur throughout biological networks, much more often than in random networks. The same small set of network motifs appears to serve as the building blocks of transcription networks from bacteria to mammals. Specific network motifs are also found in signal transduction networks, neuronal networks and other biological and non-biological networks. We have experimentally studied the function of each network motif in the transcription network of E. coli. Each network motifs can serve as an elementary circuit with a defined function: filters, pulse generators, response accelerators, temporal-pattern-generators and more. Evolution seems to have converged on the same motifs again and again in different systems, perhaps because they perform these information-processing functions. Our lab also studies topics in evolution, experimentally and theoretically. We have measured the cost and benefit of gene expression in E. coli, and demonstrated in evolutionary experiments that protein levels evolve to maximize fitness within a few hundred generations. Other studies are on the origin of modularity in biological systems based on evolution in changing environments, and on the plasticity of the input functions of genes. Many of these experiments were performed using novel systems for measuring the behavior of gene circuits within living cells. We have developed a library of 2000 E. coli strains in which green fluorescent protein reports for the activity of the vast majority of the organisms' promoters. We are currently also developing a system for dynamic monitoring of hundreds of proteins in individual living human cells (see movies). Prof. Alon is an enthusiastic new father, whose daughter Gefen was born in 2007. He acts and teaches in Playback Theatre, an improvisation theatre that aims to connect people by listening to real life stories told by audience members and enacting them on the spot