Ruth Hershberg

Ruth (Ruti) Hershberg is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Ruth & Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), Haifa, Israel. During her time as a postdoc in the Petrov Lab (2006-2011), Ruth studied the ways in which purifying selection changes within and between different organisms. She has demonstrated that the strength of selection changes between different strains of E. coli and Shigella and causes significant differences in the rate of gene loss; that M. tuberculosis evolve under extremely reduced purifying selection, leading to a large proportion of differences among M. tuberculosis strains having functional consequences. Furthermore, Rutis demonstrated for the first time that mutation is generally, possibly almost universally, biased towards AT and that the genomic GC content variation in bacteria is most likely driven by selection and/or biased gene conversion. She also showed that the choice of optimal codons across organisms is driven by selection at the level of the genomic GC content. She received her Ph.D. from Hebrew University (summa cum laude) under the guidance of Hannah Margalit.