Professor Tali Mass received her PhD from the Hebrew University, Israel, focusing on coral physiology. She then did a post-doctoral fellowship on coral biomineralization at Rutgers University, USA, in the laboratory of Prof. Paul Falkowski. In 2014 she started her own laboratory at the university of Haifa, Israel, where she continues studying the basic mechanism responsible for calcium carbonate (CaCO3) precipitation in calcifying organisms, specifically corals. She targets her study on how corals respond physiologically and morphologically to changes in their environment from the molecular to the organism level.

The main focus of the lab involves understanding how stony corals catalyze the precipitation of their biomineral. I seek to address the questions: Where and when is the biomineral formed? And what is the biophysical basis for the precipitation reaction? In addition, I target my study on how calcifying marine organisms respond physiologically and morphologically to changes in their environment and to better understand the role of algal symbionts (genus Symbiodinium) in coral (host) calcification.