Prof. Illana Gozes

Prof. Gozes is a Professor Emerita, formerly Lily and Avraham Gildor Chair and Director of the Adams Super Center for Brain Studies. She is currently the Director of the Elton Laboratory in Molecular Neuroendocrinology. She received her B.Sc. from Tel Aviv University, her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute, and performed her postdoctoral training at MIT and the Salk Institute. She was a Fogarty-Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH and a Humboldt Awardee. She mentored over 65 graduate students has published over 350 papers, with an h-index of 79. She has multiple patents including (NAP, Davuentide), a clinical drug candidate targeted at the ADNP. Prof. Gozes discovered ADNP, essential for brain formation implicated in autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. NAP is the active site of ADNP. She was awarded multiple prizes including the Teva Founders Prize, Landau and Best Applied Scientist Prize from Tel Aviv University. She served as President of the Israel Society for Neuroscience, a member of the Council of Higher Education. She is currently Secretary of the European Society for Neurochemistry, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Molecular Neuroscience, and Chief Scientific Officer of ATED Therapeutics.

Prof. Gozes studies the mechanisms shared by mutations in different genes associated with autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Her research targets ADNP and Tau in Alzheimer’s disease. Her team strives to uncover shared mechanisms affecting brain diseases toward better understanding of brain function and the molecular and cellular level translated into the behavioral level, critical for learning, memory and social interactions: Using knowledge acquired in the laboratory, we aim toward drug development to currently intractable diseases.