Hermona Soreq

Hermona Soreq was born in 1947 in Tel Aviv

Hermona Soreq, born Even, was born on April 3, 1947. Her mother Tamar Even later ran the Havив school, and her father Yosef Even was an IDF officer and a member of the Shai. She studied at the Haviv school and the Hebrew Reali School.

She earned a B.Sc. at the Hebrew University and an M.Sc. at Tel Aviv University. She completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Weizmann Institute in 1976. From 1977 to 1979 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in New York.

She worked at the Weizmann Institute from 1979 to 1986, then set up her lab at the Hebrew University and became a full professor there in 1989. She headed the Silberman Institute of Life Sciences from 1995 to 2000. In 2005 she became the first woman to serve as Dean of the university's Faculty of Science.

Her research studies acetylcholine and the microRNAs and transfer RNA fragments that regulate it. She found links to anxiety, inflammation, stroke, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Her work helped develop an experimental drug for Crohn's disease and myasthenia.