Prof. Maya Schuldiner was born in Israel. She graduated magna cum laude with a BSc in Biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1998. She went on to complete both her MSc and a PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Nissim Benvenisty, also at the Hebrew University, in 1999 and 2003. Maya conducted postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Prof. Jonathan Weissman at the University of California in San Francisco from 2003 until 2008, when she joined the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. She has been a tenured associate professor since 2015 at the department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science and a Full Professor since 2020.

Schuldiner received a Human Frontiers Science Program Career Development Award in 2008 and became a member of the EMBO Young Investigator Programme in 2011 and of EMBO in 2017. She received three consecutive European Research Council grants (StG in 2010, CoG in 2015 and in 2020). Schuldiner is also the recipient of the FEBS Anniversary and National prizes (2015, 2017) and the EMBO Gold Medal award (2017). She was elected a member of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences in 2020 and at the same year she was elected as an ambassador of the Technical Unviersity of Munich (TUM), where she performed a sabbatical. Recently Schuldiner was awarded the FEBS Bucher award (2023), the Ira Herskowitz award for leading yeast geneticist (2022) and the Jean Vance award for breakthrough discoveries in the contact site field (2023). Schuldiner currently holds the Dr. Omenn and Martha Darling Professorial Chair in Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

In 2025 she received the Bruno award of the Israeli Institute of Advanced Studies.