Nissim Ben-Arie has a B.Sc. in Biology and M.Sc. in Biological Chemistry (both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel), and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Human Genetics (from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel). He started studying brain development as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Huda Zoghbi (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA), where he established the essential role of Math1 in neurogenesis, particularly in the cerebellum. He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has served as the Head of the Teaching Program and later as the Chairman of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. He is currently studying the molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating the development of spinal cord and midbrain dopaminergic systems.