Prof. Robert Fluhr was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1984. He spent several years as a Research Fellow at Rockefeller University’s Department of Plant Molecular Biology, before joining the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Plant Genetics (now the Department of Plant and Environemntal Sciences) in 1986, and headed the Department from 1997-2003. Since 2009, he has been head of the Life Science Core Facilities (formerly Biological Services). He is the incumbent of the Sir Siegmund Warburg Professorial Chair of Agricultural Molecular Biology.
How plants and their fruit survive in a hostile world are the focus of Prof. Fluhr’s research. One of his lab’s projects involves the life strategy of a tomato fruit pathogen and how it interacts with an array of natural fruit defences. He found that a fungus survives by invading fruit at early unripe stages and bides its time,waiting for the fruit’s natural defensive chemicals to disappear. In another project, he recently unraveled a molecular control switch for programmed cell death in plants. Local cell death can help stymie the spread of disease, and the cell accomplishes this by activating enzymes called proteases, which chop up essential proteins and thus program the cell to die. His team found a molecule that traps these enzymes, functioning like a molecular mouse trap, latching onto a specific protease and inactivating it when the destruction must be slowed down. Understanding these phenomena is highly relevant to enhancing crop protection.
Prof. Fluhr received the Yigal Alon Career Development Award (1986-1989) and the Morris L. Levinson Prize in Biology (1992). He has served as President of the Israel Society for Plant Cell Culture and Molecular Biology (1993-1994). From 1996-2001, he directed the National Resource Center for Plant Genome Biotechnology, under the auspices of the Israel Ministry of Science.