Assaf received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. During his postdoc, he studied computational cell biology at the Departments of Bioinformatics and Cell Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at the Danuser lab.

His lab develops computation-first approaches to derive new hypotheses from cell image data, and demonstrate their application in diverse domains such as intracellular organization, multicellular information processing and in vitro fertilization.