- Associate Professor, Tel Aviv University
Structural Biology
Dr. Maayan Gal is an Associate Professor at the School of Dentistry at Tel Aviv University, where his research focuses on the discovery and development of novel protein modulators as the foundation for new therapeutics. He earned his BSc in Biophysics from Bar-Ilan University, his MSc and PhD in Physical Chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School from 2009 to 2012.
Dr. Gal’s laboratory integrates computational, biophysical, and cellular biology tools to tackle challenging targets in the space of protein-protein interactions. His work centers on two key areas: the calcineurin-NFAT protein interaction — the T-cell activation switch — as the basis for developing new immunosuppressants; and immune checkpoint receptor function as a T-cell inhibition switch, with applications in developing new therapeutics for inflammation and cancer. For the Colton Consortium, his group is developing new mode-of-action calcineurin inhibitors for acute colitis therapeutics.
