Noam Harel was born in the US and raised in Ramot Meir, a small moshav in the center of Israel. She completed three years of military service in an elite intelligence corps technological unit. Noam enrolled in a joint degree of biological and medical sciences in Tel Aviv university for her undergraduate studies and graduated with honors. During her studies, she worked as a research assistant in the labs of Professors Adi Stern and Uri Gophna, studying interactions between “cheater” viruses in the MS2 bacteriophage. She then continued in Prof. Adi Stern’s group in the direct PhD track.

Noam studies evolution and the genetics of viruses, applying the powerful combination of laboratory work with bioinformatics and data analysis to answer complex biological questions. Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Noam has naturally shifted focus to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus, leading high impact projects ranging from the patterns of spread of the virus into and within Israel at the beginning of the pandemic and assessing vaccine effectiveness against different variants of concern of SARS-CoV-2.