Associate Professor, Technion Faculty of Biology: Visitor Group Leader EMBL Hamburg; Associate Member, Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB), Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Hamburg, Germany
Dr. Meytal Landau holds a B. Pharm from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Ph.D. degree from Tel-Aviv University, and conducted her postdoctoral research at UCLA with Prof. David Eisenberg. Landau heads a research lab at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and is establishing a new lab at the CSSB, affiliated with DESY and the UKE, Hamburg, Germany. The lab focuses on microbial and antimicrobial amyloids associated with infections and their connection to neurodegenerative diseases.
The group pioneered atomic-level analysis of bacterial and eukaryotic amyloids involved in cytotoxicity and antibacterial activity, and exposed an extreme structural diversity, extending beyond canonical amyloid cross-β structures. In particular, the discovery of a novel class of cross-α amyloid fibrils of toxic peptides presented a unique protein architecture, offered drug targets and leads, and opened a fresh perspective to study amyloid-related toxicity.
Dr. Landau has received more than 20 awards and honors, including the Biophysical Society’s Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award (2019) and the Wolf Foundation’s Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research (2018).
