Nir Ben-Tal

Nir Ben-Tal (Hebrew: ניר בן-טל) is the Abraham E. Kazan Chair of Structural Biology at Tel Aviv University.

Early life Nir Ben-Tal is a professor at Tel Aviv University, where he has held the Abraham E. Kazan Chair of Structural Biology since 2018 as a member of the School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry & Biophysics. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology, Chemistry and Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1988 and his DSc in Chemistry at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1993.

Career His research group at Tel Aviv University developed Conservation Surface Mapping (ConSurf) in response to certain algorithmic limitations. He received a 2018 NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme Prize in radiological and nuclear (CBRN) defence for his project “The Anthrax MntABC Transporter: Structure, Functional Dynamics and Drug Discovery”. In 2022 he co-authored the book From Molecules to Cells: The Origin of Life on Earth, which hypothesizes on the beginning of life on Earth. Over his career he has published articles in scientific journals as well as scientific textbooks such as Introduction to Proteins: Structure, Function and Motion.