Nir Drayman

Biography

Nir Drayman, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on understanding viral infection outcomes at the single-cell level, with particular emphasis on herpes simplex virus and coronaviruses. Drayman received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2015, where his doctoral work on virus-host interactions earned him the Aschner Prize from the Israel Society for Microbiology and the Hans Wiener Prize for outstanding Ph.D. thesis.

Following his doctorate, Dr. Drayman completed postdoctoral training at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of Chicago, where he developed single-cell approaches to study viral infections. His work on SARS-CoV-2 led to the discovery of masitinib as a broad coronavirus 3CL inhibitor that blocks viral replication, published in Science in 2021. He has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Science, eLife, Nature Communications, and mBio, with research spanning viral entry mechanisms, host-pathogen interactions, and antiviral drug discovery.

Dr. Drayman was elected Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025 and received the DP2 New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health in 2022, providing $1.5 million over five years to study how cell-to-cell variability influences viral infection outcomes. He has served as co-chair of satellite sessions at the International Herpesvirus Workshop and co-organized the Single Cell Virology satellite meeting at the American Society for Virology annual meeting. Drayman is a member of the American Society for Virology and the American Society for Microbiology.

Education

• Ph.D. in Cell Biology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015
• B.A. in Biology, The Open University, 2002

Distinctions

• HFSP (Human Frontier Science Program) postdoctoral fellowship, 2017-2020
• Elected Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025
• DP2 New Innovator Award, NIAID, NIH, 2022
• EMBO long-term fellowship, 2016-2017
• The Sir Charles Clore Postdoctoral fellowship, 2015-2016
• Best oral presentation award at the 44th International Herpesvirus Workshop, 2019
• The Aschner Prize for outstanding PhD thesis, Israel Society for Microbiology, 2016
• The Hans Wiener Prize for outstanding PhD thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015
• The Faculty of Medicine Prize for an outstanding PhD thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015
• Best poster award at the annual meeting of the Israeli Society for Microbiology, 2011