Anat Zimmer, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

Computational Biology

My academic career started with a BSc in computer science and biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to my coursework, I worked for Intel Corporation, and in a molecular-biology lab, studying the ubiquitin system in yeast. Next, I perused a master’s degree (MSc) at the Weizmann institute at the lab of Prof. Uri Alon, in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology. My MSc project was to characterize the proteomic response of cancer cells to four anti-cancer drugs provided by the Merck Serono pharmaceutical company. The work included tissue culture and lab techniques, operating microscopy systems and developing image analysis software. I continued in Uri Alon’s lab for my PhD, and my main project was to find a method that will predict the effect of cocktails of three or more drugs on cancer cells and bacteria using only a small number of experiments. We succeeded to find such a method which uses measurements of single and pairs of drugs at several doses, to accurately predict the effect of all combinations of three and four drugs at all doses. During my PhD studies, I was also involved with formal and informal education. I taught a Matlab course for MSc and PhD students at the Weizmann institute, along with an advanced light microscopy course. I coordinated an afternoon activity in science for excelling junior-high students, and gave lectures to and participated in many activities with the nonscientific community to share my scientific knowledge with them.

Data analysis, computational biology, programming, image analysis, molecular cell biology