Dr. Nayef Jarrous, 39, is the winner of this year's Yoram Ben-Porath Prize as the outstanding young researcher at the University. The prize is awarded annually by the president of the University to honor the memory of Prof. Ben-Porath, former rector and president, who was killed along with his wife and young son in a car crash near Eilat in 1992. 

Dr. Jarrous' research has yielded new understanding of an early stage of the complex system whereby genetic information in DNA is converted into protein through RNA.

Dr. Jarrous was born in Shfaram into a Christian Arab family whose parents were both teachers. He attended public schools in his hometown and earned three degrees in science at the Hebrew University, followed by postdoctoral training at Yale University. He has been a lecturer in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Faculty of Medicine since 2000.

In 1989 he earned the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine prize for a distinguished M.Sc. thesis. He is a recipient of the Kahanoff Foundation fellowship and has won research grants from, among others, the Israel Science Foundation, the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation and the Abisch-Frenkel Foundation of Switzerland.

Dr. Jarrous' wife Ghada has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Hebrew University and is now doing a post-doctorate at Hadassah University Hospital. They are the parents of a daughter, Dima, and live in Jerusalem.