Affiliation: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of Oslo
Keywords: Educational genetics, Neurodevelopmental conditions, Mental health, Twins, Intergenerational transmission, Learning differences, Psychiatric genetics, Social-science genetics
Full profile: Dr. Moran Frenkel-Pinter is an assistant professor in the Institute of Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her BSc and PhD in biotechnology from Tel Aviv University. As a PhD student, under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Segal and Prof. Ehud Gazit, she studied the role of protein glycosylation in the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease, and in collaboration with Prof. Shai Rahimipour from Bar-Ilan University, she synthesized glycopeptides to study the effect of glycans on peptide self-assembly. She then became a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and, subsequently, a research scientist in its School of Chemistry. As a member of the Center for Chemical Evolution and team leader at the NASA Center for Origins of Life, she focused on elucidating mechanisms that lead to the formation of proto-peptides that can spontaneously polymerize, fold, and interact with nucleic acids under prebiotic conditions. As an Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellow and Vice Director of the Minerva Center for the Planetary Emergence of Life, Frenkel-Pinter’s research merges concepts from biotechnology and origins of life chemistry, fields in which she specialized during her PhD and postdoctoral research, respectively. She harnesses the creative power of chemical evolution to develop evolving functional biodegradable polymers for biotechnological applications. She recently won the Stanley L Miller Early-Career Research Award. She received a FEBS Excellence Award, an ERC StG, and a FEBS Excellence Award.