Karen Avraham

Who is Karen Avraham?

Karen B. Avraham is an American-Israeli human geneticist. She is a full professor at Tel Aviv University, and the current Vice Dean of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine. Her laboratory is in the Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry. She is currently President of the Israel Society for Auditory Research and a board member of the I-CORE: Gene Regulation in Complex Human Disease. She is Associate Editor of the journals European Journal of Human Genetics and EMBO Molecular Medicine. She served as President of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology in 2011 and President of the Genetic Society of Israel.

Prof. Avraham received her B.A. degree in Biology from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, under the supervision of Prof. Yoram Groner, and her post-doctoral training at the National Cancer Institute, Frederick, MD, U.S., under the supervision of Dr. Nancy Jenkins and Dr. Neal Copeland.

Karen Avraham’s research has centered on the discovery of disease genes, focusing on hereditary hearing loss. Her team takes a comprehensive approach to study the molecular basis of hearing loss, using genetic, developmental, biochemical, cellular and bioinformatic tools. She leads the effort in exome sequencing for the discovery of disease genes to identify mutations that are relevant for the hearing-impaired population. Her group has demonstrated that microRNAs are essential for development and function of inner ear hair cells in vertebrates.