Barak loves molecular biology. During his master'-s at Tel-Aviv University, he studied how plants recognize attacking fungi. For his PhD, he moved to the Department of Neurobiochemistry at Tel Aviv University to study how the signaling of an important cancer protein is coordinated inside the cell. Following his Ph.D., he moved to Vancouver, Canada. He found a new role for a cancer protein in Huntington's disease, a neurodegenerative disease, and that this cancer protein plays a key role in how cells mount their anti-oxidativestress response. He then moved to Leicester, UK, to study a protein known to regulate gene expression to find that it participates in the decision-making process of cells undergoing oxidative stress, where they decide which RNA to translate into a protein. Currently, Barak has a lab at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev where he and his team study normal genes exploited by tumor cells for their own advantage. For this, he studied genes whose products do not code for proteins, metabolic vulnerabilities of tumor cells, and molecular mechanisms exploited by tumor cells to overcome such metabolic stress. Most of  the projects are in collaboration with a wide breadth of scientists from different disciplines, including ecology, cyber security, and medicine.