Prof. Maya Schuldiner

Prof. Maya Schuldiner was born in Israel. She graduated magna cum laude with a BSc in Biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1998. She went on to complete both her MSc and a PhD in genetics at the laboratory of Prof. Nissim Benvenisty, also at the Hebrew University, in 1999 and 2003. Maya conducted postdoctoral research in the Laboratory of Prof. Jonathan Weissman at the University of California in San Francisco from 2003 until 2008, when she joined the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. She has been a tenured associate professor since 2015 and a Full Professor since 2020. She became a member of the EMBO Young Investigator Programme in 2011 and of EMBO in 2017. She received three consecutive European Research Council (ERC) grants (StG in 2010, CoG in 2015 and in 2020). Schuldiner is also the recipient of the FEBS Anniversary award, National prize and Bucher medal (2015, 2017, 2023), the EMBO Gold Medal award (2017), the Jean Vance prize for breakthroughs in Contact Site research (2018), the Ira Herskowitz Award for leading yeast geneticist (2022), the Bruno prize of the Institute for Advanced Studies (2024) and the Otto Warburg prize of the German biochemical society (2026). She was elected as a TUM ambassador and as a member of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

 

This year, 2026, she was elected to the Israeli National Academy of Science and Humanities. Schuldiner currently holds the Dr. Omenn and Martha Darling Professorial Chair in Molecular Genetics and serves as the Dean of the Weizmann School of Science.

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Schuldiner’s research focuses on uncovering functions for uncharacterized proteins using the bakers yeast as a central eukaryotic model. She does this by using high content screening approaches coupled with dedicated follow-ups and with an interest on processes that occur inside organelles.