Dr. Melamed is the manager of the Livnat lab. He spearheads the design of novel techniques and their application to the study of mutational and recombinational mechanisms in the Livnat lab and helps to supervise research projects on the fundamental nature of mutation. He earned his undergraduate degree in Biology magna cum laude and his Masters in Cell Research and Immunology summa cum laude at Tel Aviv University, studying the effects of mutations on viral assembly and release from cells in the human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1). He received his Ph.D. at the Israel Institute of Technology, the Technion, studying mRNA translation regulation. Following Ph.D. and prior to joining the Livnat lab, he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Fellow at the University of Washington at Seattle in the lab of Stanley Fields, where he honed his expertise on molecular biological methods development with an emphasis on large-scale sequencing and mutagenesis studies.