RNA biologist Shulamit Michaeli receives the Israel Prize in life sciences

Prof. Shulamit Michaeli of Bar-Ilan University received the 2026 Israel Prize in life sciences research at the national ceremony in Jerusalem on 22 April 2026, which closed Israel's 78th Independence Day. Her selection had been announced by Education Minister Yoav Kisch in January. The prize recognised her contributions to understanding RNA in the parasites that cause serious infectious diseases.

Michaeli, 70, grew up in Givatayim and studied at Tel Aviv University, where she went straight from a bachelor's degree with honours into a doctorate on gene activity in bacteria. As a postdoctoral researcher in San Francisco she took part in discovering trans-splicing, a process in which parasites cut and join pieces of RNA from different places to make working messages. She opened her own laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1990 and moved to Bar-Ilan in 1998, where she later served as dean of life sciences and as vice president for research.

Her laboratory studies trypanosomes, which cause sleeping sickness, and Leishmania, which causes the skin disease cutaneous leishmaniasis. With Nobel laureate Ada Yonath she showed that a single chemical change in the Leishmania ribosome alters its shape as the parasite moves from the cooler body of a sand fly to a warm mammal. She also identified a stress response in which the parasite triggers its own death, found that certain drugs can switch it on, described a long non-coding RNA that controls when trypanosomes become infectious, and showed that parasites signal stress to each other through tiny vesicles called exosomes.

Building on this, her group is developing a nanoparticle treatment that in animal studies destroyed the Leishmania parasite within about twenty minutes, and is working with Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center toward human trials. Colleagues also credit her with training a generation of Israeli researchers.