Jakub (Kobi) Abramson was born in Prague in 1976. He earned his PhD in 2005 at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He then spent five years conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School (with Diane Mathis and Christophe Benoist) before re-joining the Weizmann Institute in 2011 as an independent group leader. He became a tenured professor of immunology at the Weizmann Institute in 2018. Between 2022-23 he took a sabbatical leave, which he spent at IOCB Prague, with a partial affiliation with Faculty of Science at Charles University.
Since establishing his own laboratory at the Weizmann Institute, his research group has mainly been interested in understanding how immunological tolerance to self is established in the thymus and how breakdown of this process results in autoimmunity. In addition to basic research in the fields of immunological tolerance and autoimmunity, the Abramson lab also aims at translating their findings into novel tools for immunotherapy and/or diagnostics of autoimmunity and cancer. In one of such projects they try to “exploit” the break of tolerance (i.e. autoimmunity) to specific tissues to immunotherapeutic tools for corresponding types of cancer.
In addition to conducting research in the above-mentioned areas, Prof. Abramson is also very active in teaching several immunology courses including the Core Immunology course (@ WIS) and a popular "Dr. House style" course - Clinical Cases in Immunology (@ WIS and @Charles University), in which he teaches the basic principles of the immune system through authentic clinical cases and "experiments of nature".
