Parents, Doctors, and Doctors-to-Be

The couple, currently in the midst of their internships at the Rambam Health Care Campus, were awarded PhDs last week during a ceremony at the Technion. Both completed the challenging MD-PhD program, which trains physician-scientists at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion. After finishing their internships in a few months, they will also receive their medical degrees.

Dr. Jonathan Gross and Dr. Tamar Koren

Tamar and Jonathan, now the proud new parents of nine-month-old Naomi, met at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine in 2013 and became a couple shortly after the start of their first year. Tamar, a gifted violinist, came to the Technion after graduating with honors with a bachelor’s degree in music from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University. She joined Prof. Asya Rolls’ lab, which studies the physiological mechanisms underlying the connection between the brain and the immune system. In her PhD study, led by Prof. Rolls, and published in Cell (2021), they demonstrated that in cases of inflammatory processes, a brain region called the insula accumulates substantial information about the dynamics of inflammation. Moreover, targeted reactivation of the insula can reignite the inflammatory response, broadening the concept of “immune memory” beyond the immune system to the brain itself.

Jonathan Gross grew up in Tel Aviv, studied a scientific track (physics, electronics, and computer science), and thought he would focus on physics in the future. “But during the last months of my military service, I had time to read and reflect. I used that time to read several different books describing the experiences, memories, and insights of doctors from various fields. After being discharged, I was exposed to the activities of the open clinic run by Physicians for Human Rights, which provides medical care to people without access to the public healthcare system (refugees and asylum seekers). I started volunteering there. That was the first time I saw doctors working up close, and I decided I wanted to study medicine. That’s how I ended up at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, where I met Tamar and asked her to study calculus together. She agreed — and the rest is history.”

Jonathan’s doctoral research, under the guidance of Prof. Ruth Hershberg, continues the research initiated by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Sarit Avrani. It is known that many species of bacteria can survive for decades in food from which they have extracted resources. Previous studies conducted in Prof. Hershberg’s lab demonstrated that E. coli bacteria can genetically adapt to extreme and prolonged starvation conditions. In evolutionary experiments and whole-genome sequencing, the researchers in the lab deeply characterized these processes.

Tamar and Jonathan

“In my research,” says Jonathan, “we wanted to better understand the dynamics of bacterial evolution under prolonged starvation conditions. We did this by making changes in the experimental design, such as changing the volume of bacterial cultures or using a different bacterial species. In this experimental setup, we examined how these changes affected both the overall dynamics of the adaptation observed under these conditions as well as the specific genes involved in this adaptation. We found that many aspects of the genetic adaptation dynamics of ‘starved’ bacteria remained fairly consistent, even when significant parameters in the experimental design were altered. However, certain aspects of this dynamic are sensitive to the experimental design. In particular, we observed that the identity of the genes accumulating adaptive changes is highly dependent on the specific conditions of the experiment and the bacterial species chosen (Genome Biol Evol. 2020; Genome Biol Evol. 2024).”

Tamar and Jonathan have experienced both research and medical studies, and they hope to be able to combine the two fields, as well as family life and parenting, as they continue their careers — a challenging task. Tamar continues to perform research with Prof. Rolls in addition to her internship, intending to bring their insights to the medical treatment world through clinical trials. Jonathan estimates that he will specialize in radiology, “because it is a field that touches on many branches of medicine — internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and more.”