Or Shemesh , PhD

Following his grandparents' passing of Alzheimer’s disease, Or pursued Neuroscience in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His early work transformed cultured sea slug neurons into a model for tauopathies and Alzheimer’s disease. During his PhD, Or realized  that the community studying brain disease is in dire need of technologies that will help decipher disease etiology. To learn the art of tool building, Or joined the Synthetic Neurobiology group in MIT. He created novel molecular technologies to read out and to control the brain at a single cell resolution. Among these tools were a calcium indicator that enables single cell resolution readout from neurons in the live brain, called SomaGCaMP (Shemesh et al., 2020) , and somatic Optogenetic molecules that enable playing the brain like a piano, one key (cell) at a time (Shemesh et. al., 2017). Or is now pursuing making tools for the diseased brain, with an emphasis on neurodegeneration. 

Or won numerous awards, including the NIH Trailblazer Award for Early Stage Investigators, the Chorafas prize by the Karolinska institute (for neuroscience research), the Simons foundation (for autism research), and has already been funded by the Reeves Foundation for blindness research, the NIH for Alzheimer’s research and the Pitt Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center for tauopathy research. 

In counter disease engineering, Or is building and leading a diverse, multicultural, impact driven and FUN group.