Asya Rolls

Asya Rolls was born in 1975 in Russia

Asya Rolls was born in Russia in the USSR. After moving to Israel, she finished the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1993.

She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in life sciences at the Technion. She then did her doctorate at the Weizmann Institute under Michal Schwartz and Ofer Lider, studying how the immune system affects the growth of new brain cells. She completed her PhD in 2007.

In 2008 she received a Fulbright Scholarship and did postdoctoral work at Stanford University. There she studied how sleep affects memory, and also how lack of sleep harms bone marrow stem cell transplants in mice.

In 2012 she began leading a research group at the Technion, where she taught at the Rappaport medical school until 2024. Her lab showed that activating the brain's reward system in mice strengthened immune responses and reduced tumor size, work linked to the placebo effect. She is now a professor at Tel Aviv University and was an International Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Wellcome Trust researcher from 2018 to 2023.