News

• Oct. 2025: secured a consultancy contract with GitLife Biotech under a Innovate UK award, helping to translate state-of-the-art error-correcting codes into GitLife’s platform, in order to validate next-generation, evolution-resistant DNA barcodes that enable secure, scalable tracking and verification of microbial strains from lab to industrial bioreactors.
• Oct. 2025: thank you to the DNA-Data-Storage Alliance for inviting me to speak at their all-members monthly meeting.
• Sep. 2025: satisfied to have participated in MFO Workshop 2537: New Mathematical Directions in Coding Theory; a heartfelt thank you to the organisers for the wonderful workshop.
• Apr. 2025: our manuscript was accepted to ISIT 2025: Anisha Banerjee, Yonatan Yehezkeally, Antonia Wachter-Zeh and Eitan Yaakobi, "Correcting Multiple Substitutions in Nanopore-Sequencing Reads."
• Apr. 2025: our manuscript was accepted to ISIT 2025: Frederik Walter and Yonatan Yehezkeally, "Coding for Strand Breaks in Composite DNA."
• Dec. 2024: we've had a tremendous time at Dagstuhl Seminar (24511): "Coding Theory and Algorithms for Emerging Technologies in Synthetic Biology."

Biography

I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Computing with the ICOS Research Group, School of Computing, Newcastle University (UK). From 2020 to 2025, I was a senior researcher with the Associate Professorship of Coding and Cryptography (Prof. Wachter-Zeh), School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. From 2021 to 2024, I was hosted at TUM as a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Post-Doctoral Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

I received the B.Sc. degree (cum laude) in mathematics and the M.Sc. (summa cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel, in 2013, 2017, and 2020 respectively.

My area of expertise is Coding Theory and algorithms for error correction, particularly as applied to nascent data-storage media.

Select awards / grants

• 2020: Awarded a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for postdoctoral researchers.
• 2020: Awarded a Minerva Fellowship for a research residency at TU Munich, EI, LNT (host: Prof. Antonia Wachter-Zeh) from the Minerva Stiftung. (Declined due to conflict with Humboldt Research Fellowship.)
• 2020: Received the Dr. Max Fogiel and Helen J. Kaufmann Award for Highest Student Achievment in Electrical Engineering, from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
• 2008: Winner of the Intel Prize (Israel) for excellent BSc students in relevant fields of study.

Research Interests

In recent years I've focused on DNA-based data storage, including

• Novel sequencing and synthesis technologies, e.g., nanopore sequencers and composite DNA.
• Combined noise models, e.g., substitutions, deletions/insertions, duplications (aka 'sticky' insertions/deletions), sliced-information, etc.
• Applications of Levenshtein's reconstruction schema to data-storage channels, particularly when motivated by the technology itself.

I'm also working on novel coding techniques for memories (particularly NVMs), such as

• Rank modulation and permutation codes, designed to alleviate cell degradation.
• Mixed codes and information capacity in defect memory devices.

My interests further include combinatorial analysis and structures in general, as well as algebraic structures.

Service to community

Organisation

• Co-organiser: Dagstuhl Seminar (24511): "Coding Theory and Algorithms for Emerging Technologies in Synthetic Biology." Wadern, Germany, 2024.
• Finance Chair: IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Munich, Germany, 2027.
• TPC member: International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA), Taipei, Taiwan, 2024.
• Session chair: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2022--2025.
• Session chair: Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography (MWCC), Munich, Germany, 2022.

Reviewer, Funding agencies

• Israel Science Foundation (ISF).

Reviewer, Journals

• IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theory (2015-2025)
• IEEE J. on Selec. Areas in Inform. Theory (2023--2025)
• Nature Comput. Sci. (2024)
• IEEE Trans. on Comm. (2024)
• Cryptography and Communications (2023-2024)
• J. Combin. Theory Ser. A (2023-2024)
• IEEE Trans. Mol., Bio. and Multi-Scale Commun (2024)
• Disc. Math. (2023)
• Designs, Codes and Cryptography (2019-2021)

Reviewer, Conferences

• IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT): 10 years (2012--2025)
• IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW): 3 years (2019--2022)
• IEEE International Symposium on Topics in Coding (ISTC): 1 year (2021)
• International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA): 1 year (2020)

• Digital Systems (at BGU; mandatory module for Bachelor students), Winters 2018/19,2019/20.
• Calculus 1 (at BGU; prep. module for Bachelor students), Summer 2016/17.

• Articles

  • Yehezkeally, Y, Polyanskii, N. On codes for the noisy substring channel. IEEE Trans. Mole., Bio., a. Mult. Comm., Special Issue on Ten Years of DNA-Based Data Storage 2024, 10(2), 368--381. In Preparation.
  • Banerjee A, Yehezkeally Y, Wachter-Zeh A, Yaakobi E. Error-Correcting Codes for Nanopore Sequencing. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2024, 70(7), 4956-4967.
  • Yehezkeally Y, Bar-Lev D, Marcovich S, Yaakobi E. Generalized Unique Reconstruction From Substrings. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2023, 69(9), 5648-5659.
  • Bar-Lev D, Marcovich S, Yaakobi E, Yehezkeally Y. Adversarial Torn-Paper Codes. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2023, 69(10), 6414-6427.
  • Yehezkeally Y, Schwartz M. Uncertainty of Reconstruction With List-Decoding From Uniform-Tandem-Duplication Noise. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2021, 67(7), 4276-4287.

• Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

  • Banerjee A, Yehezkeally Y, Wachter-Zeh A, Yaakobi E. Correcting a Single Deletion in Reads from a Nanopore Sequencer. In: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2024). 2024, Athens, Greece: IEEE.
  • Banerjee A, Yehezkeally Y, Zeh-Wachter A, Yaakobi E. Error-Correcting Codes for Nanopore Sequencing. In: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2003). 2023, Taipei, Taiwan: IEEE.
  • Yehezkeally Y, Al Kim H, Puchinger S, Wachter-Zeh A. Bounds on Mixed Codes with Finite Alphabets. In: IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW 2023). 2023, Saint-Malo, France: IEEE.
  • Yehezkeally Y, Bar-Lev D, Marcovich S, Yaakobi E. Reconstruction from Substrings with Partial Overlap. In: International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA 2022). 2022, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan: IEEE.
  • Bar-Lev D, Marcovich S, Yaakobi E, Yehezkeally Y. Adversarial Torn-paper Codes. In: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2022). 2022, Espoo, Finland: IEEE.
  • Yehezkeally Y, Polyanskii N. On Codes for the Noisy Substring Channel. In: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2021). 2021, Virtual; Melbourne: IEEE.
  • Yehezkeally Y, Marcovich S, Yaakobi E. Multi-strand Reconstruction from Substrings. In: IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW 2021). 2021, Kanazawa, Japan: IEEE.