Yehu Moran
Feel free to contact Yehu: yehu.moran at mail.huji.ac.il / yehum79 at yahoo.com
Yehu studied from 2001-2010 at Tel Aviv University where he obtained a BSc in Life Sciences, MSc in Biochemistry and PhD working on sea anemone toxins. Then he moved to the lab of Ulrich Technau at the University of Vienna to study the evolution of post-transcriptional regulation by small RNAs. At January 2014 he was appointed as a senior lecturer at the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior of the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and nowadays he is a Professor at this department. He is currently serving as an elected Department head. (picture below by Yonit Schiller and the Hebrew University).
Our Research
I am an experimental biologist. I find the interface between bioinformatics, genomics and experimental biology very exciting but I'm not a CS person. I was trained in a wide range of biochemical techniques as my master degree is in biochemistry. In my PhD my topics of research switched more into evolution and in my postdoc I also added developmental biology into the mix. Later as a faculty at Jerusalem I also became fascinated by organismal biology and molecular and chemical ecology. I believe cnidarians are a wonderful research system if you want to get a perspective about what animal life looked like 600 million years ago since this is when they diverged from the rest of the animals. Despite being considered "primitive" they share with us humans sophisticated cell types, including neurons and muscles. The interesting topics you can study with this system are endless. The thread that connects all our research topics is the evolution of complex systems. We wish to understand how extremely complex system are formed and maintained across large evolutionary timescales despite their apparent cost. You can find below our current research topics: