Dr. Ran Zalk was recently recruited as an associate research scientist at the National Institute of Biotechnology in the Negev (NIBN) at Ben-Gurion University, and will be leaving Columbia Medical Center after more than a decade. Ran spent the past ten years at Andrew Marks’ laboratory studying the structure and function of the skeletal muscle ryanodine receptor, the largest known ion channel. Ran’s lab in Israel will be focused on larger order cellular structures involved in Ca2+ signaling and skeletal muscle contraction, using cryo-electron tomography and single particle reconstruction.

Ran received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel, where he was born and raised. He then received his Ph.D. in the department of life sciences at Ben-Gurion University, under the mentorship of Dr. Varda Shosha-Barmatz, studying the biochemistry of ATP as a neurotransmiter. He spent the next decade pursuing the structure of the ryanodine receptor using crystallographic tools and Cryo-EM in collaboration with the Wayne Hendrickson and Joachim Frank laboratories. The team’s study of the RyR1 structure was recently published in Nature. Stay tuned for the next paper on the gating mechanism of RyR1.