Professor Ashraf Brik is The Jordan and Irene Tark Academic Professor at the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He received his B.Sc. in Chemistry from the Ben-Gurion University in 1996, his M.Sc. in 1998, and earned his Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 2001.

After spending three years as a postdoc and two years as a senior research associate at the Scripps Research Institute, Brik returned to the Chemistry Department at his Alma Mater as an Assistant Professor in 2007. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011, and Full Professor in 2012. In 2015, Brik moved to the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at Technion, where he is leading an interdisciplinary research group in chemical biology.

His research involves the development of novel synthetic approaches to shed light on fundamental questions on the role of posttranslational modifications in cellular processes, overcoming the limitations of the enzymatic methods to obtain these modified proteins. This has enabled numerous studies in a wide research area, from investigating the role of ubiquitination and phosphorylation in Parkinson’s disease to cancer.

Brik also pioneered the development of chemical tools to study and target deubiquitinates and to discover effective macrocyclic peptides that bind tightly to specific ubiquitin chains and attenuate their activities in biological processes.

Brik has received several awards such as the Israel Chemical Society Prize for Excellence, the 11^th Hirta Award, The Friedrich Bessel Research Award, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award, the Leonidas Zervas Award, and the 2024 Rapport Award. In 2024 Prof Brik was elected as a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.