Roy Kishony PhD

Professor Roy Kishony is the Henry and Marilyn Taub Professor of Life Sciences in the Faculty of Biology and holds a secondary position in the Faculty of Computer Science. He also is the immediate past director of the Lorry I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering.

Prof. Kishony is one of the most prominent names in the struggle against bacterial resistance to antibiotics. A physicist and mathematician by training, he recently developed an AI-based algorithm to combat antibiotic resistance that markedly helped doctors at Maccabi Healthcare Services prescribe the correct antibiotic for urinary tract infection patients. He has also used genetic mapping of pathogens to unravel the emergence of antibiotic resistance during infection within the human host. And he has developed “antibiotic cocktails” that can counteract and even reverse the evolution of antibiotic resistance. These approaches inspire a novel paradigm of patient-tailored antibiotic diagnostics and treatment.

Born in Israel, Prof. Kishony received his bachelor’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1992 through an elite program that allows participants to study while serving in the Israel Defense Forces. He earned his doctorate from Tel Aviv University in 1999, conducted postdoctoral studies at Princeton University and The Rockefeller University, and then joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he became a full-tenured professor. He moved back to Israel and joined the Technion in 2014.