Dr. Omri Bronstein is a curator of marine invertebrates at the Steinhardt Museum and a senior lecturer at the School of Zoology, Tel Aviv University (TAU). He completed his PhD in Zoology, supervised by Prof. Yossi Loya (TAU), and postdoctoral studies at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria, in 2015–2019. His main interest is understanding the forces that drive speciation in marine environments. He studies taxonomy, biogeography and ecology of marine invertebrates, focusing on echinoderms as model organisms. He employs a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating novel genomic diagnostics with state-of-the-art comparative morphology to answer questions pertaining the evolution of benthic marine taxa. He is particularly interested in sexual reproduction of broadcast spawning marine invertebrates as he considers sexual reproduction, the primary process for generating new genetic lineages, essential to our understanding of biodiversity, biogeography and evolution at large.

He is the recipient of fellowships and research grants from Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL), the International Society for Reef Studies (ICRS), the EU SYNTHESYS, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Yad-Hanadiv, and Israel Science Foundation (ISF), and has authored more than 25 scientific papers.