Judith Berman is a Professor at Tel Aviv University since 2012 and 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.
Prof. Berman is an EMBO Member, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology, and is also a former member of the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology’s International Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB) from 2016 to 2023.
The Berman lab (Judith Berman Lab | Tel Aviv University (jbermanlab.com) 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.