Osnat Penn

Osnat Penn (; born in 1981), She is the third Israeli scientist in three years to win the UNESCO-L'Oréal fellowship, which she received in 2013 for her work on the genetic origins of autism. Penn is currently a postdoctorate fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she has been working since 2012. She also completed a Master's degree in Molecular biology and a Ph.D. in Computational Biology, both with the department of cell research and immunology. Her Ph.D. thesis was titled "Computational methods for sequence analysis of HIV evolutionary dynamics," and was supervised by Tel-Aviv professor Tal Pupko. RASER, the RAte Shift EstimatoR, is used to test site-specific evolutionary rate shifts and identify the specific sites and lineages in which the shifts likely occur. The Pepitope Server is used to map epitopes using affinity-selected peptides.

Her work with autism genetic sequencing, which won her the UNESCO-L'Oréal award and a grant of $40,000 to further her studies, worked to identify genetic variations in autistic children that differed from genome sequences in allistic parents.

Publications Penn has been published in Cell, Genome Research, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Nucleic Acids Research, Systematic Biology, BMC Evolutionary Biology, PLoS Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Proteins, Genome Medicine, Nature, Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Genome Biology, American Journal of Human Genetics and Protein Engineering, Design and Selection.