Dan Peer

Dan Peer was born in 1972 in Israel

Dan Peer was born on July 19, 1972, in Rehovot and grew up in Rishon LeZion. As a youth he took part in science activities at the Weizmann Institute. He finished high school at Amit Amal.

He earned all his degrees at Tel Aviv University: a bachelor's in biology in 1998, a master's in biochemistry in 2000, and a doctorate in biophysics submitted in 2004. During his doctorate he trained in the labs of César Milstein at Cambridge and Robert Langer at MIT. He then did postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he studied immunology.

In 2008 he returned to Israel as a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University and became a full professor in 2015. He chaired the university's Cancer Biology Research Center from 2016 to 2020 and in 2017 founded the SPARK center for translational medicine. From 2020 to 2026 he was the university's Vice President for Research and Development, and from 2021 to 2025 he chaired Ramot, its technology transfer company.

His lab was the first to show systemic, cell specific delivery of mRNA in an animal and developed a bacterial mRNA vaccine. It also created new lipids that carry RNA, licensed to companies including BioNTech and Merck. He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2023 and received the Rappaport Prize and the Landau Prize in 2026.