Yehuda Ben-Shahar, PhD

Dr. Yehuda Ben-Shahar was born and raised in Israel. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Life Sciences from Tel-Aviv University. Soon after he graduated, Yehuda joined the laboratory of Prof. Gene Robinson at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a graduate student where studied the neurogenetic and neuroethological mechanisms of social behaviors in the honey bee. For his postdoctoral training, he joined the laboratory of Prof. Michael Welsh at the HHMI/ University of Iowa College of medicine to study the role of non-voltage gated ion channels in regulating sensory functions and neural plasticity by using the fruit fly as a model. Yehuda joined the Biology Department at Washington University in St. Louis in 2008 as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2019. Dr. Ben-Shahar and members of his lab continue to study the roles of genes in regulating behavior in health and disease across the evolutionary developmental, and physiological timescales. Dr. Ben-Shahar also teaches advanced lecture and lab courses on the genetics of behavior.