Professor Yftah Tal-Gan received his B.S. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He then worked on his M.S. and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the groups of Professor Chaim Gilon and Professor Alexander Levitzki. His doctoral dissertation was on the development of new peptide-based inhibitors of Protein Kinase B (PKB/Akt) as potential drugs for Cancer. Upon completion of his Ph.D. work, Yftah joined the laboratory of Professor Helen Blackwell at University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Postdoctoral Research Associate working on the development of peptide-based tools and materials to study quorum sensing in Staphylococcus aureus. In 2014 Yftah joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Nevada, Reno as an Assistant Professor in Chemical Biology and as of July 1, 2020 he was promoted to the Associate Professor rank.

Since joining the University of Nevada, Reno, Yftah has established a chemical biology research program with the overarching goal of developing and utilizing peptide-based probes to study bacterial communication pathways and their role in bacterial pathogenesis and inter-species competition. This research program is multidisciplinary and spans from organic synthesis and analytical characterization, to biological screening, structural determination of biomacromolecules, and molecular microbiology. Current projects in the lab are funded by two National Institutes of Health (NIH) and one National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, and resulted in 20 papers from the lab.