Professor Rachela Popovtzer is Vice Dean and Head of the Laboratory of Nano-Bioengineering at the Faculty of Engineering at Bar Ilan University. She is also a member of the Bar-Ilan Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA), Israel. She received her B.Sc. degree in physics from BIU and her M.Sc. and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan with Prof. Raoul Kopelman. Popovtzer joined the faculty of Engineering in 2008, here she is currently the head of the Bioengineering track and the Laboratory for Nano-medicine. Rachela Popovtzer is a winner of numerous international grants and awards, such as the Intel Prize, the EU Environment and Living foundation Prize and the Atol Charitable Trust Fellow in Nano Medicine. Her current research interest focuses on the development of ’smart’ nanoprobes for theranostic applications.

Research Lab

The main goal of our research group is to develop design principles for nanoparticles to be used both as molecular imaging contrast agents and for targeted therapy. Our multidisciplinary research approach integrates chemistry, engineering, biology and radiology in order to gain understanding about biological processes and to identify diseases based on molecular markers, which appear earlier than the diseases' clinical symptoms. Understanding fundamental biological mechanisms underlying nanoparticle behavior in living subjects will set the stage for new diagnostic and therapeutic clinical applications.

Novel antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) nanoplatform.