Osnat Penn (Hebrew: אסנת פן), born in 1981,[1] is an Israeli computational biologist whose work focuses on molecular evolution, cell research, and immunoinformatics.
[2] She is the third Israeli scientist in three years to win the UNESCO-L’Oréal fellowship, which she received in 2013 for her work on the genetic origins of autism.
Her Ph.D. thesis was titled "Computational methods for sequence analysis of HIV evolutionary dynamics," and was supervised by Tel-Aviv professor Tal Pupko.
[2] Penn has been responsible for several different computer programs developed at Tel Aviv University in order to aid in biological research.
Her work may lead to prenatal screening and early diagnosis of autism, as well as the development of gene therapy as an interventional treatment.