Naama Geva-Zatorsky

Assistant Professor Naama Geva-Zatorsky heads a lab in the Technion Integrated Cancer Center at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. She is also affiliated with the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion.

The Geva-Zatorsky lab, established nearly three years ago, studies the interaction of gut microbes and the host immune system in health and disease. She has characterized the host response to a variety of intestinal microbes and has developed an approach that fluorescently labels the microbes to visualize them live inside organisms. Other research projects in her lab focus on antibiotic-resistant bacteria; the emerging field of the gut-brain axis, which explores the interaction between intestinal bacteria and the brain; and how gut bacteria can be used for cancer prevention and treatments.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, many of the researchers in the lab have been working with colleagues at the Rambam Health Care Center and Meir Medical Center to develop a coronavirus home test kit. The test is based on saliva samples and would be inexpensive, easy to use, and capable of delivering results in several minutes.

Prof. Geva-Zatorsky received her bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University in 2002, majoring in both biology and chemistry. She went on to the Weizmann Institute of Science to earn her master’s and doctoral degrees in systems biology, in 2005 and 2012, respectively. She conducted her postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School, and then joined the Technion.

She has received numerous awards including the Alon Fellowship for outstanding young researchers, the International L’Oréal-UNESCO Prize for Women in Science, an EMBO Fellowship, the John F. Kennedy Prize for academic excellence and scientific accomplishments, and appointments as the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar 2018-2020.