Dr. Nir Ohad

Curriculum Vitae

Nir Ohad was born in Jerusalem Israel in 1959. He has a first degree in Biology and Earth sciences, a second and third degree in Genetics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Upon completing his Ph.D diploma under the guidance of Professor J. Hirschberg, entitled “Molecular characterization of the D1 protein of photosystem II in cyanobacteria: function-structure relationship” he has joined at the laboratory of Professor R. Fischer in UC. Berkeley, USA, studying Plant Embryogenesis. Dr. Ohad has joined the Department of Plant Sciences at Tel-Aviv University in 1998. Since then he is studying epigenetic regulation of gene expression mediated by polycomb proteins (PcG), which methylate Histone 3 on L27. Dr. Ohad research is aimed at understanding the role of PcG in regulating plant development. To this end he is using the model organisms Arabidopsis a representative of flowering plants and the moss Physcomitrella patens, a representative of early terrestrial plants both serving to understand how polycomb function has evolved during land plant evolution. Dr. Ohad together with his colleague Prof. Yalosvky were among the first to adopt the Bimolecular fluorescence complementation assay ( BiFC) to study protein-protein interactions in plants. Dr. Ohad is teaching introductory class on plant biology as well as advanced classes on plant development. Dr. Ohad was a visiting scientist at the New-York Botanical Gardens Laboratories, USA on summer 2006.