Raya Faigenbaum-Romm, PhD
Dr. Raya Faigenbaum-Romm completed her BSc Magna cum laude in Chemistry and Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University, followed by an MSc in cancer research under the supervision of Prof. Yoel Kloog, which led to a first-author publication (Faigenbaum et al., Oncotarget, 2013).
For her PhD, Raya transitioned to Microbiology and Computational Biology under the mentorship of Prof. Hanah Margalit at the Hebrew University, where she studied post-transcriptional regulation by bacterial small RNAs (sRNAs) in Escherichia coli. Raya made significant contributions to the development of RIL-seq (RNA interaction by ligation and sequencing), a methodology for identifying Hfq-associated sRNA targets. This work was published in Molecular Cell, 2016, and Nature Protocols, 2018, with Raya as an equal-first-author on both papers (Melamed, Peer, Faigenbaum-Romm et al., Molecular Cell, 2016 and Melamed, Faigenbaum-Romm, Peer et al., Nature protocols, 2018). The development of RIL-seq has opened many research directions for laboratories around the world and has been applied to various human bacterial pathogens.
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Further, Raya expanded her PhD research to explore how sRNAs modulate gene expression, based on the RIL-seq data. This work resulted in the characterization of different types of sRNA-target interactions that yield different regulatory outcomes, providing important insights into the target features that determine the regulatory outcome of a given sRNA-target interaction (Faigenbaum-Romm et al., Cell Reports, 2020).
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In her postdoctoral studies, Raya has shifted her focus to study bacterial heterogeneity in pathogenic bacteria. She led the development of Microcolony-seq, a novel method for identifying inherited phenotypic heterogeneity in human pathogens. Applying this technique to clinical samples of both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, she has uncovered co-existing phenotypic subpopulations with implications for host adaptation and therapy design (Faigenbaum-Romm et al., Cell, 2025).
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Raya was selected for the prestigious EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship Award and for the Hebrew University Program for Outstanding Women PhD students for Postdoctoral Studies but had to decline both due to COVID-19 pandemic.
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Raya is passionate about exploring microbial diversity and the interplay between host and pathogen, with the goal of applying this knowledge to improve therapeutic strategies.