Baruch Minke

Hebrew University, Department of Medical Neurobiology and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC)

Dr. Baruch Minke received his PhD in physiology and biophysics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During his post-doctoral training at Purdue University, IN, USA, he learned from Prof. William L. Pak the great power of Drosophila genetics and molecular genetics and combined this approach in his electrophysiological and biochemical studies of phototransduction in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. He is a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the Hebrew University and a member of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was a visiting research professor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biologische Kybernetik in Tübingen, Germany and at the Department of Neuroscience, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA. He has been a Member of the Editorial Board of several International Journals. As a result of his studies on phototransduction in Drosophila, he co-discovered a new type of ion channel, which he designated the Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) channel. He investigated the biophysical and biochemical properties of TRP channels in Drosophila eyes and identified biochemically and electro-physiologically alongside Prof. Zvi Selinger, phospholipase C as a crucial component of the Drosophila TRP signaling pathway. The principles that he and his colleague Prof. Roger Hardie from Cambridge University have found in TRP channels are common to numerous biological systems, thus laying the foundation for the study of molecules that underlie mechanisms of TRP and pain, first initiated by Prof. David Julius .

Ben Katz

Hebrew University, Department of Medical Neurobiology

Dr. Ben Katz received his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Philosophy from the Hebrew University in 2003. He earned his PhD (summa cum laude) from the Hebrew University in 2012 under the supervision of Dr. Baruch Minke. During his PhD, he studied the molecular determinants affecting translocation and assembly of the light activated TRP and TRPL channels and the mechanisms underlying low background dark noise in Drosophila Melanogaster. As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Alexander Binshtok, he studied a human carrying a novel loss-of-function mutation in the gene encoding for the heat activated TRPV1 channel, which is associated with nociception and pain. He is currently the head of educational laboratories in physiology and a research associate at the Department of Medical Neurobiology at the Hebrew University. He is currently investigating a structural domain of the TRPV1 channel called Ankyrin repeat and its effect on channel activation as well as phototransduction in Drosophila.