Bio

Uri Hershberg, PhD, is a Professor at the University of Haifa Department of Human Biology and Director of the University’s Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology (CBQB). He is also a visiting Professor at the Drexel University School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.

He leads the Systems Immunology Lab at University of Haifa, which is one of the leading labs in the world for the study and computational analysis of B cell receptor repertoires. SImLab developed several tools for analysis and modeling of immunology experiments used for research published in Nature, Journal of Experimental Medicine, and other leading journals. Most importantly, they have developed ImmuneDB (immuneDB.com), a tool for rapid database creation, analysis, visualization, and dissemination of high throughput B cell receptor and T cell receptor sequencing experiments. In recent work, published in Nature Biotechnology, Dr. Hershberg has used ImmuneDB to lead the first study of B cell repertoires in human tissues, leading to the discovery that the gut and blood tissues have orthogonal B cell receptor repertoires.

Prof. Hershberg has published over 50 papers on topics related to B-cell, T-cell, and dendritic cell immunity, as well as the defining complex system criteria of cognitive perceptual systems, using the immune system as an example. In 2016-17, he organized a research group and international conference on stochasticity and control in immune repertoires at the Israeli Institute for Advanced Studies. Dr. Hershberg was the 2017-2018 awardee of the Australasian Society for Immunology (ASI) ’s visiting speaker program.

Education

• PhD Computational Biology, Thesis: The Emergence of Meaning in Biological Systems. Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation (ICNC), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. 2005
• MS Neural Computation, Hebrew University. 1999 
• BS Double major in Biology and Psychology. Cum laude. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. 1996

Research Interests

Bioinformatics, immunology, neural computation, system biology, somatic selection, autoimmunity, genetic stability, germline diversity, dendritic cell, transcription elements, pathogens, computational and mathematical modeling, complex systems, cognition and inflammation