The Technion’s story has been intertwined with Israel’s for more than a century, from laying the foundations for a new nation to shaping its future.
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Shai Shen-Orr, professor in the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion, heads the Laboratory of Systems Immunology & Precision Medicine. He is director of the Technion’s Healthy Aging Institute and the Zimin Institute for AI Solutions in Healthcare, and he serves as deputy vice president for fundraising strategy.
The Technion Healthy Aging Institute tackles one of the most complex and urgent challenges in modern medicine: enabling individuals to maintain health and vitality in their later years, even as global life expectancy rises. By leveraging the expertise of researchers from across the University, the multidisciplinary Institute aims to close the gap between lifespan and “healthspan” — the years in which individuals remain healthy and independent.
Prof. Shen-Orr also directs the Laboratory of Systems Immunology & Precision Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine, where he develops novel analytics that he applies to study the drivers of immune variation, particularly in the context of aging and evolution, and to further precision medicine. By identifying diagnostic biomarkers that evaluate immune health, he has developed a metric that gauges one’s “immune age,” a more accurate measure of health than chronological age. Extending his research on immune diversity more broadly, he is co-chief science officer of the global nonprofit, the Human Immunome Project.
As director of the Zimin Institute for AI Solutions in Healthcare, he leads the effort to develop technologies based on big data and machine learning to improve healthcare, and he oversees Technion’s AI in healthcare partnerships as part of Tech.AI, Technion’s center for AI.
Based on his academic research, Prof. Shen-Orr founded CytoReason, a PharmaAI global leader in computational disease biology. The company, where he serves as chief scientist, is set on developing the human-machine interfaces needed to tackle biomedical research in the twenty-first century. In collaboration with world-leading pharma companies, CytoReason is developing computational disease models that are closing the data-insight gap in drug development.
Prof. Shen-Orr holds a bachelor’s degree from the Technion and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
