Professor Yosef Shiloh, ICA-financed researcher, was born in Haifa in 1949. He received his training in human genetics and cancer research at the Technion in Haifa and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 2005-2006 he was named a Fogarty Scholar in the National Human Genome Research Institute, the arm of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
He maintains a permanent position at the Department of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine at the Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, where he is incumbent of the David and Inez Myers Chair in Cancer Genetics and head of the Myers Laboratory for Genetic Research.
He is a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a member of numerous international organizations, among them the European Molecular Biology Organization and the Human Genome Organization.
For nearly 30 years, Professor Shiloh has been investigating the response of mammalian cells to damage caused to the DNA by environmental agents such as radiation and carcinogenic chemicals.
Ever since he was a doctoral student he has focused his work on the devastating human genetic disorder Ataxia-Telangiectasia (A-T). This disease is caused by a defect in the response to radiation damage to the DNA. The defective gene in this disease was identified in his laboratory in 1995, a discovery that paved the way for a series of research studies on the cellular response to radiation damage, carried out in his and many other laboratories across the globe.