Julia Shifman

Prof. Julia Shifman is a Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on computational and experimental protein engineering, particularly redesigning protein-protein interfaces to develop novel therapeutic proteins for cancer, degenerative, and inflammatory diseases. She leads a lab investigating enzyme stabilization (e.g., MMP-9 variants) and structural biology of protein interactions, including cold spot analysis.

Education: PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology. Current lab members include PhD and M.Sc. students working on drug design, protein-ligand interactions, and microbiology. Collaborations involve computational methods like machine learning and mass spectrometry.

Key projects include engineering stable proteases for drug screening and understanding cold spots in protein interfaces to enhance binding specificity. Recent breakthroughs include stable MMP-9 variants and structural insights into cold spot formation.