Dr. Yoni Haitin

Proteins are molecular machines essential for all cellular activities. When they malfunction due to genetic mutations or environmental effects, they also underlie and facilitate many human diseases. As the roles of these crucial cellular building blocks are tightly related to their atomic structures, deciphering disease-related mechanisms requires scrutinizing proteins’ utmost fundamental molecular properties.

The lab of Dr. Yoni Haitin focuses on studying ion channels and prenyltransferases, two types of radically different enzyme families. By utilizing cutting-edge biochemical and biophysical approaches, they delineate the structural mechanisms underlying functional regulation of these key protein families. Moreover, given the emerging pivotal roles these proteins play in numerous diseases, they use high-throughput screens to identify novel modulators, which may prove beneficial for future development of targeted therapeutic strategies.

Dr. Yoni Haitin completed his Ph.D. studies at Tel Aviv University and his postdoctoral training at the University of Washington, where he was awarded the Human Frontier Organization Long Term Postdoctoral Fellowship. Haitin has established a structural-physiology research program at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the School of Medicine. Dr. Haitin is a co-author of 27 papers, serves as the secretary of the Israeli Society for Physiology and Pharmacology and is on the editorial board of PLoS One.