Liran Carmel

Liran Carmel (; born August 7, 1971) is an Israeli scientist, professor of computational biology at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Carmel is the Snyder Granadar Chair for Genetics, and is the 2021 Massry Prize laureate for his studies in the field of ancient DNA.

Biography

Carmel was born and raised in Israel. He studied for a B.Sc. in physics in the Academic Atuda, and served in the military as a physicist in Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. During his military service, he obtained his M.Sc. degree in quantum mechanics at the Technion - Israel institute of technology, under the supervision of Ady Mann. After his military service, Carmel completed his Ph.D. degree in mathematics and computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the supervision of David Harel. In his Ph.D. Carmel developed algorithms for odor coding and digitization, and was head of the algorithms team in a company that developed means for computerized odor transmission. In 2004, Carmel went to the United States for postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he specialized in molecular evolution in the research group of Eugene Koonin.

Carmel returned to Israel in 2008, and established a computational biology research group at the department of Genetics, the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2016 he was invited as a senior visiting professor to the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where he spent a year.

Research Carmel is studying computational molecular evolution, and is particularly interested in human evolution and ancient DNA. He published dozens of research papers in these fields.

In 2014, together with Professor Eran Meshorer, he developed a computational technique to reconstruct genome-wide maps of DNA methylation (a key epigenetic mechanism) from ancient DNA sequences. He applied this technique to ancient DNA from Neanderthal and Denisovan, and thus was the first to reconstruct epigenetic patterns of archaic humans, and to identify genes that are differentially methylated between archaic and modern humans.