Shay Laps was born in 1990 in Kiryat Tivon. While studying chemistry and physics in high school, he also won four championships and three trophies as a water-polo player in the local and national teams. He served in the IDF’s academic military program, receiving his BSc in Chemistry and a teaching certificate from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2011. While studying for his MA in science and technology education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Shay was elected voluntary chairperson of the student union at the Eilat campus. In 2014, after completing his MA, Shay moved to the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he completed his MSc in chemistry in 2017, under the supervision of Prof. Ashraf Brik. Shay recently completed his PhD in Prof. Brik’s laboratory at the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry in the Technion, where he developed novel Pd chemistries for the challenging synthesis of unique and inaccessible posttranslationally modified peptides and proteins (e.g., ultrafast regioselective synthesis of peptides and proteins bearing multiple disulfide bonds).