Balaban completed her PhD degree in Condensed Matter Physics at the Weizmann Institute. She first became interested in biophysics and studied mechanical forces in cells with Benny Geiger in 2000. She then joined Stanislas Leibler’s lab in Princeton University as a postdoctoral researcher, where she was a Robert H. Dicke Fellow. Since 2003, she has been a faculty member in the Physics Department of the Hebrew University. Her research today is considered groundbreaking in the biophysical description of the responses of bacteria under antibiotic treatments, and their implications for understanding treatment failure and evolution of resistance