Mirit I. Aladjem

The story of Mirit I. Aladjem's life

Aladjem earned a Ph.D. at Tel Aviv University. She then worked as a research associate at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Later she was a postdoctoral fellow and a Leukemia Society Special Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

In October 1999 she joined the Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute, part of its Developmental Therapeutics Branch. She became a senior investigator in 2007 and heads the DNA replication group.

Her research looks at how signaling pathways change chromatin to control chromosome duplication and the cell cycle. Her team was the first to map replication origins across a whole genome, linking replication to histone changes and chromatin packaging. Her newer work identified proteins that decide whether chromatin regions replicate during normal growth and after cancer treatment.