Mor Nitzan moved back to Israel from the United States in 2020 after completing her fellowship work as a John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow and James S. McDonnell Fellow at Harvard University. She then started her lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she combines her expertise in computer science, physics, and computational biology. “Israel has a fantastic scientific community”, she says, “where interdisciplinary science is very much encouraged. To be able to communicate and collaborate across disciplines was an important factor in my career move.”
Nitzan initially heard about the EMBO Young Investigator Programme through word-of-mouth and excellent recommendations from alumni of the EMBO programme. She decided to apply for it to strengthen collaborations across disciplines and provide better opportunities for her group team members. And in late 2024 was successfully selected. “I am grateful for this opportunity and looking forward to creative and out of the box brainstorming with fellow scientists”, Nitzan states.
A physicist by training, Nitzan established her computational lab at the intersection of three faculties, within the School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Racah Institute of Physics and the Faculty of Medicine. Her group members are similarly coming from different backgrounds and aim to better understand how cells encode multiple layers of spatial and temporal information, and how to efficiently decode that information from single-cell data. One of the main research angles intends to better understand how populations of cells are organized in space and time, which mechanisms control such spatial-temporal organization, and how can they be perturbed to alternative configurations.
“Living at the border of several disciplines and being connected to many communities is crucial for our creative processes, the questions we ask and the approaches for making progress in these areas”, explains Nitzan.
