Galit Lahav

Galit Lahav received her PhD in 2001 from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. In 2003, she completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She then spent a year at Harvard’s Bauer Center for Genomics Research, and in 2004 joined the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. In 2018 Lahav became the Chair of the Department of Systems Biology.

Galit’s goal is to determine why human cancer cells often show different responses to the same treatment, and to identify new therapies that will increase the efficacy of anti-cancer drugs. Her research program works across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Her lab has pioneered computational and quantitative experimental approaches to studying the fate and behavior of human cells in disease and health at the single-cell level. Her work has yielded critical insights into the function and behavior of tumor-suppressing mechanisms and their role in cellular destiny.

Galit has been recognized through several awards and honors including the Smith Family Award, Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, and Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring awards. She has established and organized leadership and management workshops for postdocs and faculty, as well as developed programs for advancing women in science.

Galit is now leading a department that uses the power of systems thinking, across macro and micro scales, to unlock new insights into health and disease. Her goal is to establish new initiatives that promote the development of novel single-cell technologies as well as the analysis of vast amounts of data, to create new mathematical models and formulas that will let us move from observing biology to predicting and engineering it.