Judith Berman

Judith Berman has been a Professor of Molecular Biology at Tel Aviv University since 2012 and is Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota. She studies how pathogenic yeasts respond to their environments, primarily using Candida albicans and Candida glabrata. She is working to understand drug response mechanisms caused by genetic mutations, genomic copy number changes, as well as by physiological processes that affect genetically identical cells differently.

Berman's lab takes an interdisciplinary approach using genetics, genomics and cell biology, combined with chemistry, bioinformatics, and computational biology. She has studied fundamental aspects of morphogenesis, chromosome stability, chromosome components from centromeres to telomeres and origins of replication, chromatin-mediated silencing, gene essentiality, as well as drug resistance. Most recently, her work is addressing drug tolerance, the ability of some cells to grow, albeit slowly, in the presence of a drug that inhibits other cells in the same population. Her group is asking how drug responses differ between cells in a single population, and how adaptive responses differ due to natural genetic variation between yeast isolates.

In addition to her membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Berman is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, and a member of the National Academies of Science.

She received a B.S. in Plant Pathology from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science.