Itai Yanai
Itai Yanai is a Professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine.
He received his undergraduate degrees in Computer Engineering and the Philosophy of Science and his PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University. After postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Yanai set up his independent lab at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, which became a pioneer of the single-cell RNA-Seq approach and its application to the study of evolution and development.
The Yanai lab moved to NYU in 2016 and since then has been using computational and experimental approaches to make contributions to understanding cellular plasticity in the fields of tumor progression, cancer drug resistance, host-pathogen interactions and bacterial genome regulation.
Together with Martin Lercher, Yanai has also co-authored a popular science book, entitled “The Society of Genes” and has co-founded the Night Science Institute which champions a cultural shift in science by training researchers to embrace the creative Night Science process as an essential complement to rigorous hypothesis testing.