Dr. Shulamit Levenberg hopes her work will lead to cures for degenerative diseases.
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
An Israel scientist has been named to Scientific American magazine's list of 50 people and organizations that have demonstrated technological leadership in research, business or policymaking.
Dr. Shulamit Levenberg, 37, a biomedical and tissue-engineering researcher at the Technion, whose work aims toward creating tissues and organs for transplant in labs, hopes her work will lead to cures for degenerative diseases.
Although the construction of a synthetic pancreas, heart or lung is still far off, she and her colleagues are working at the problem. They believe repairing damaged brain, cartilage or muscle tissue will come first.
Levenberg, modern Orthodox and the mother of five (including a baby), spent five years as a post-doctoral re-searcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she built biological scaffolds to coax stem cells into developing into specific cell types.
Previous winners of the distinction include the founders of Google and several Nobel Prize winners.
Learning how they develop into different types of cells is a challenge and will supply a great deal of information on fetal development and the creation of blood vessels that nurture tissue, she says.
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