Noam trained as a chemist with Jack Szostak working on the origin of life and the development of early replicating systems. During this training he studied the molecular evolution of RNA and the chemistry underlying replication in a pre-cellular world. As a postdoc Noam moved to the Weizmann Institute to study carbon metabolism in Ron Milo’s lab in the hopes of finding ways to improve photosynthetic carbon capture through protein engineering. Since rubisco is both the first step and the bottleneck in the Calvin-cycle, Noam developed biochemical assays to study rubisco in higher throughput. After moving to UC Berkeley to work with Dave Savage, a protein engineering expert, Noam continued to work on rubisco in even higher throughput by using a rubisco-dependent E. coli strain to generate a comprehensive map of rubisco mutants.