I have received my Ph.D. from Ben-Gurion University in 2014 studying aroma production in melon fruit under the supervision of Aaron Fait and in Efraim Lewinsohn Newe-Yaa’r research center. Following, supported by the BARD-Vaadia Postdoctoral Fellowship program, I have joined the lab of Jim Giovannoni at the Boyce Thompson Institute, where I worked on genetic mapping of fruit quality traits in high-resolution using sequencing-based approach. From 2018, I am a researcher at the Unit of Aromatic and Medicinal Plants in Newe-Ya’ar Research center. My goal is to bring state-of-the-art methods to the field of Aromatic and Medicinal Plants to promote both science and breeding. That includes (but not limited to) sequencing-based genotyping and QTL mapping, transcriptomic analyses, metabolomics and genome editing.

People have been used plants for medicine, perfumes and as aromatic herbs for thousands of years. The biological activity attributed to these plants is a result of various chemical compounds, known as specialized metabolites.  These compounds display a huge chemical diversity that contributes to our kitchen, medicine cabinet and perfume bouquet. This diversity presents both between species and within a species. I am interested in the genetic and genomic mechanisms that have been driven this chemical diversity which are largely unknown. The active compounds in some of these important plants are unknown or their biosynthetic pathway is still a riddle and it is my objective to answer these questions.

In a process of selection and breeding over many years, the yield and other agronomically important traits of aromatic and medicinal plants have been greatly improved. Yet, controlling for these important factors and simultaneously preserve high chemical quality, on the plant and post-harvest, is still a challenging task. In the last few decades plant breeding evolved from classic breeding to molecular breeding using marker assisted selection (MAS), but due to the high prices, was limited to major crops. Nowadays, when DNA sequencing is fast, high-throughput, reliable and reasonably priced, MAS can be applied to aromatic and medicinal crops. In conjugation with novel genome editing techniques we try to create modern tools to address scientific questions and breeding needs.