My name is Maor Knafo, and it’s hard to describe myself without letting my passion for living systems spill through the seams. Even as a kid, I ran around with snakes and lizards in my backpack—and the occasional insect in my pocket. That restless curiosity stayed with me, maturing into a scientific drive to understand the strange logic of life.

I’m currently a postdoc in the MCG group at IBE Barcelona. My work focuses on how biological systems regulate themselves, and how stress disrupts, rewires, or even teaches them. I see this not just as survival, but as a kind of learning, often embedded in the simplest forms of life.

Lately, I’ve been drawn to a deeper question: how organisms form internal models of the world, and how those models shape what cells do. That intersection, between perception and function, is where I work, and where I wonder.