Daniel M. Michaelson

Daniel M. Michaelson is Professor of Neurobiology at the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University. He graduated from the Hebrew university in Jerusalem with a BSc in Physics and Mathematics in 1968 and obtained in PhD in Biophysics form the University of California Berkeley in 1973. His post-doctoral training was in neurochemistry at the laboratory of Professor M.A. Raftery at the California Institute of Technology where he studied the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and it's functional reconstitution. He joined the faculty of life science at Tel Aviv University in 1974 where his research first focused on the mechanisms underlying neurotransmitter release. His current research focuses on Alzheimer's disease and the mechanisms underlying the effects of genetic risk factors of the disease and their crosstalk with environmental factors. Specifically the research focuses on apolipoprotein E4, which is the most prevalent genetic risk factor of Alzheimer’s disease, and on the development of therapeutic approaches to counteract its pathological effects. He was the first director of the Tel Aviv University Rabin Institute for neurobiology and is the incumbent of the Lebach chair in molecular Neurodegeneration.