Michal Linial is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In October 2012, she assumed the position of Director at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. Prof. Linial obtained her PhD in Molecular Biology from HUJI, with postdoctoral training at Stanford University in the field of molecular neuroscience. Prof. Linial is a fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) and served as Vice President until 2015. She is an active member of the steering committees of major Computational Biology organizations (RECOMB, ECCB, ISMB) as well as the head of the ELIXIR-IL node. She was a visiting Professor in Genome Research at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a Visiting Scholar in Microsoft Research, Cambridge in Boston. Prof. Linial served as the Director of the Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology (2003-2012), and she is currently the chair of the Computational Biology program at HUJI. Her laboratory deals with the cellular and molecular mechanisms for coping with changing settings and extreme conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, aging, stress and pathogens. Prof. Linial’s lab developed and hosts several open databases and resources on protein families and functional annotations that serve the biomedical community.