Dr. Amit Kessel obtained his master's degree in experimental biochemistry at Tel-Aviv University, studying the innate response of human blood cells to pathogenic bacteria. During his Ph.D. studies he trained as a computational biologist, investigating the molecular basis of peptide-membrane interactions and the mechanisms of antibacterial peptides. In his post-doctoral research at Columbia University, Dr. Kessel continued studying proteins at ... Read morethe molecular level, focusing on various physicochemical aspects of protein-protein interactions. In 2010 he co-founded ES-IS Technologies, a company that designed novel enzymatic solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, and he headed the company's R&D department. He is currently involved in several academic and industrial biotech initiatives, focusing on experimentally-guided protein structure prediction and on the in-vitro construction of protein-based nanoparticles. Prof. Nir Ben-Tal obtained his bachelor's degree in biology, chemistry, and physics at the Hebrew University and his D.Sc. in Chemistry at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He carried out his postdoctoral training as a computational biophysicist at Columbia University, and later joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Tel Aviv University. His research covers various aspects of computational biology with a focus on structural bioinformatics and the protein universe. In particular, his laboratory has predicted the 3- dimensional structures of a number of transmembrane proteins, thereby providing molecular insight into their mechanisms. His lab also develops the ConSurf web-server for the detection of functional regions by mapping evolutionary data onto protein structures (jointly with the Mayrose and Pupko labs). Show Less