Michal Levo, PhD

Michal Levo is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, and the Program for Mathematical Genomics, at Columbia University. Michal gained an interdisciplinary education with a dual undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Life sciences. 

Realizing the key role of gene regulation in shaping cellular identity initiated Michal’s ongoing pursuit to understand what determines when, where and to what extent each gene is expressed. 

Michal received a PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where as a recipient of the Azrieli PhD fellowship, she studied how regulatory instructions are encoded within individual regulatory DNA sequences. Michal developed high-throughput sequencing-based approaches to measure gene activity and single-cell binding events across thousands of systematically designed regulatory sequences. These measurements, coupled to computational analysis and modeling (including thermodynamic and machine learning approaches), elucidated determinants of gene activity outside the classically characterized transcription factor (TF) binding motifs. These studies demonstrated how differential TF binding can be predicted from sequences flanking core motifs, based on sequence composition or DNA shape features. They further revealed how properties of TF-nucleosome interplay, characterized at the single molecule level, quantitively tune gene activity.

In her postdoc Michal sought a complementary skillset that would allow her to ‘see’ gene regulation in action, in individual cells of a developing organism. She pursued a postdoc under the joint supervision of Prof. Michael Levine, a developmental and molecular biologist, and Prof. Thomas Gregor, a biophysicist, at Princeton University. As a postdoctoral fellow (recipient of the EMBO, Rothschild and HFSP fellowships), Michal harnessed advances in genome editing and single cell live imaging to quantify endogenous transcription dynamics and dissect their determinants in complex genomes. This facilitated the discovery of a pervasive genomic strategy for transcriptional coupling of distant regulatory genes in living embryos. In her new lab Michal continues to study how functionality, and specifically precise spatiotemporal gene activity patterns, emerge in the complex landscape of eukaryotic genomes.