Gideon Grafi [Ph.D.], is a Senior Investigator at the Institutes for Desert Research of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Faculty of Agriculture, where he studied the translational regulation of human beta-interferon by poly(A) tail. Following a postdoctoral study on endoreduplication and the maize retinoblastoma protein at the University of Arizona under the guidance of Brian A. Larkins, he joined the department of Plant Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, where he studied epigenetics and the control of cellular dedifferentiation in plants. Five years ago he moved to the Ben-Gurion University and his current research interests center on epigenetic perspective of stress-induced dedifferentiation and its implications to animal stem cell biology.