Shiru is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Eyal Akiva as the company’s Staff Bioinformatics Scientist. Shiru’s mission is to feed people sustainably by leveraging machine learning and precision biology to identify and create ideal food proteins.
CTO Lawrence Lee commented, “The Shiru engineering team is excited to welcome Eyal as its newest member. At Shiru, our computational discovery approach is rooted in cutting-edge innovation, and Eyal will be furthering those efforts by integrating bioinformatics and structural biology approaches for identifying targeted food proteins. We are lucky to have his skill and expertise on board!”
Eyal received his Ph.D. in bioinformatics from the Hebrew University, Israel, and continued his studies as a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF. Before joining Shiru, Eyal spent 3 years as a senior bioinformatics scientist at Zymergen. Throughout his academic career, Eyal has been involved in multidisciplinary and collaborative research of proteins: from elucidating principles of protein-protein interactions and protein modifications to generating evolutionary models of sequence-structure-function relationships. These efforts resulted in many papers published in high-tier journals.
Eyal’s move to industry was exciting, as he understood that if we understand how the function of a protein has evolved and how it is shaped by its sequence, we can engineer it more effectively!
Eyal commented, “Coming to Shiru, I am very excited to achieve that moment in which a food ingredient that is prevalent and hard-to-spell for consumers will be replaced by a Shiru protein.”
In his free time, Eyal likes to brew Turkish coffee for friends and family, grow microgreens in his garage, and bake sourdough bread.
