Rotem Sorek

Rotem Sorek is an Israeli scientist born March 16, 1975, who is a professor of molecular genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he has worked since 2014. His laboratory has discovered dozens of previously unknown bacterial immune systems that defend against viral infection, showed that components of the human innate immune system, including the cGAS-STING antiviral pathway, evolved from ancestral bacterial defense systems, and identified a peptide molecule called arbitrium that allows viruses infecting bacteria to sense their own population and coordinate a collective decision between rapidly killing their host cell or lying dormant within it. He received the HFSP Nakasone Award and the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award in 2023, the Rothschild Prize in Life Sciences in 2024, the Robert Koch Prize, the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology, and the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2025, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2025.