Ben-Zion Shilo is the Head of the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He earned his PhD at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1978, and undertook postdoctoral research at MIT before joining the Weizmann Institute faculty in 1981. 

Prof. Shilo's research focuses on the cell-cell interactions that bring about development in Drosophila. He is working on the problem of how the conserved signalling pathways that mediate these interactions succeed in generating reproducible patterns despite fluctuations in the doses of the signalling components due to genetic and environmental alterations. He aims to identify and characterize the mechanisms of this developmental robustness by combining experimental and theoretical computational approaches.