Dr Yael David

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA
Dr. David is an Associate Member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Associate Professor of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine. She earned her PhD from the Weizmann Institute, training in biochemistry and cell biology, and completed postdoctoral work at Princeton University with Tom Muir, where she developed chemical tools to study histone modifications. Since launching her lab in 2016, Dr. David has built a highly interdisciplinary program at the interface of chemistry and biology to uncover fundamental principles of chromatin regulation. Her group develops precise chemical and biochemical approaches to identify and characterize new classes of histone modifications, revealing direct links between cellular metabolism and epigenetic control of cell fate. A major focus of her work is understanding chromatin regulation in non-canonical genomic contexts, including micronuclei, exosomes, and viral episomes, where her lab has uncovered unexpected regulatory mechanisms. In parallel, her team has defined novel functions for linker histone H1 in maintaining chromatin organization and genome integrity. Together, these studies provide new insight into how chromatin-based processes operate across diverse physiological and pathological settings, including cancer, viral infection, and metabolic stress. Her contributions have been recognized by major awards and sustained support from the NIH, Sloan Foundation, and the Parker Institute.