What If Your Hard Drive Were Made of DNA?

Omer Sabary ’18, M.S. ’20, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science. He is also a 2023 Ilene & Steve Berger Technion Visiting Fellow, meeting with ATS supporters in the Northeast United States.

Born and raised in Qiryat Atta, Omer served in the elite 8200 unit of the Israel Defense Forces as a techno-intelligence analyst team commander and intelligence director prior to his Technion studies.

Currently, Omer is working on next generation DNA-based systems that could help solve the world’s digital storage crisis. He chose DNA as this storage medium for its durability and because DNA seems to be the most plausible solution to accommodating the exponential growth in the world’s digital data. His work specifically entails designing algorithms to encode digital data to DNA in a way that is resilient to errors. He conducts “wet” experiments to demonstrate the algorithms on actual synthetic DNA.

Among his extracurricular activities, Omer participated in Microsoft’s “Breeze” summer program and won third place in the program’s final competition. He served for two years as a tutor in his faculty’s Unit for the Advancement of Students and was a writer and editor for the Technion Student Association’s magazine.

Omer holds a patent for his DNA-based systems research, has been named twice to the Dean’s list, and has published three peer-reviewed papers in scholarly journals. As an undergraduate, he received the PEF Scholarship for excellence (2014 to 2018). And as a graduate student, he has been honored twice with the Memorable Paper Award from the 13th Non-Volatile Memory Workshop in San Diego (2020 and 2022) and has received several excellence awards from his department at the Technion.

Omer enjoys running, working out, and baking, and he hopes to become a professor at the Technion.