Dr. Itay Koren is a Senior lecturer and a Principal Investigator at the Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University. His research focuses on protein degradation pathways and quality control mechanisms in health and disease. Itay obtained his PhD in Biochemistry from the Weizmann institute of science where he studied autophagy under the supervision of Prof. Adi Kimchi at the Molecular Genetics Dept. He then moved to Harvard Medical School, Boston, and did his post-doctoral training in Prof. Steve Elledge lab. At the Koren lab, Itay combines genome-wide approaches and synthetic biology to obtain global view on specificity of degradation pathways. Specifically, the research is devoted to understanding the mechanisms regulating substrate recognition in the ubiquitin-proteasome system.