Baruch Minke

Department of Medical Neurobiology,

Faculty of Medicine and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC),

Department of Medical Neurobiology, Faculty of Medicine and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC)

Hebrew University

Baruch Minke is a professor in the Department of Medical Neurobiology at the Faculty of Medicine and in the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. He received his B.Sc. degree in physiology and biochemistry, M.Sc. degree in Physiology and Ph.D. degree in physiology and biophysics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

During Dr. Minke post-doctoral training at Purdue University, IN USA, he has learned from Prof. William L. Pak the great power of genetics and molecular genetics and combined this approach to his electrophysiological and biochemical studies of phototransduction in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. He was a visiting research professor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biologische Kybernetik in Tübingen, Germany and at the Department of Neurosciences, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD USA. He has been a Member of the Editorial Board of several International Journals. As a result of his studies on phototransduction in Drosophila he co-discovered a new type of ion channel, which he designated the Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) channel. He investigated the biophysical and biochemical properties of TRP channels in the Drosophila eyes and identified biochemically and electro-physiologically together with Prof. Zvi Selinger, phospholipase C as a crucial component of the Drosophila TRP signaling pathway. The channel function of the Drosophila TRP protein was first demonstrated by Dr. Roger Hardie from Cambridge University together with Dr. Minke.

Dr. Minke received a Fulbright Scholarship (1973), a research fund for excellent researcher from the Wolf Foundation (1985), the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research together with the 2021 Nobel laureate Dr. David Julius (2010) and the EMET prize in Brain Research (2010). His current research program encompasses using Drosophila mutants as well as the first identified human mutation in the TRPV1 channel.

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