Efrat Mashiach, a computer scientist and software engineer at Google, received her PhD from Tel Aviv University in 2013. Her thesis, “Structural Bioinformatics: Flexible Molecular Docking,” was written under the supervision of Prof. Haim Wolfson and Prof. Ruth Nussinov. The new methods that Efrat developed, designed and programmed (C++) for computational prediction of protein complexes are now widely used by the scientific community.

Efrat’s researched dealt with one of the key tasks of structural bioinformatics – the computational prediction of the three-dimensional structure of protein-protein complexes, given the structures of their individual protein components, otherwise known as the docking problem. She developed one of the leading algorithms for handling moderate protein backbone flexibility in docking.

Efrat is the recipient of the Wolf Foundation Scholarship as well as Google’s Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.

Efrat’s work has been published in a variety of scientific publications, including Nucleic Acids Research, Oncotarget and Proteins.