SPEAKERS
Prof. Jacob A. Frenkel
Prof. Jacob A. Frenkel is Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International and a member of the J.P. Morgan International Council. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Group of Thirty (G-30) and Chairman of the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University. Between 1991 and 2000 he served two terms as the Governor of the Bank of Israel.
He is credited with reducing inflation in Israel and achieving price stability, liberalizing Israel’s financial markets, removing foreign exchange controls, and integrating the Israeli economy into the global financial system. Between 1987 and 1991, he was the Economic Counselor and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund, and between 1973 and 1987 he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago where he held the position of the David Rockefeller Professor of International Economics.
Prof. Frenkel is a Laureate of the 2002 Israel Prize in Economics, a recipient of the Scopus Award from the Hebrew University, the Hugo Ramniceanu Prize for Economics from Tel Aviv University, the Czech Republic’s Karel Englis Prize in Economics, the “Order de Mayo al Merito” (in the rank of Gran Cruz) decoration from the Government of Argentina, the “Order of Merit” (in the rank of Cavaliere di Gran Croce) decoration from the Republic of Italy, and the YIVO Lifetime Achievement Award. He is also a recipient of several honorary doctoral degrees and other decorations and awards, including the “1993 Economic Policy Award” by “Emerging Markets” and the “1997 Central Banker of the Year Award” by “Euromoney”.
Dr. Giora Yaron
Dr. Giora Yaron is Chairman of the Executive Council of Tel Aviv University, and chairs TAU's technology transfer and intellectual property arm, Ramot. Considered one of the founding fathers of the high-tech industry in Israel, Dr. Yaron has a distinguished record of successful entrepreneurship.
He co-founded influential international companies including P-Cube (acquired by Cisco); PentaCom (acquired by Cisco); Qumranet (acquired by Redhat); Comsys (acquired by Conexant, Texas Instruments); Qwilt, and Itamar Medical Ltd.
He has served as a board member or board chairman of each company since its inception. He also served as Chairman of the Board of Mercury Interactive, which sold to Hewlitt Packard for $4.9 billion.
Prof. Joseph Klafter
Prof. Joseph Klafter was named President of Tel Aviv University in 2009, the eighth since TAU’s founding in 1956. Widely recognized in his field, chemical physics, he served as the Chairman of the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), the main institution supporting scientific research in Israel, from 2002 to 2009.
In 2011, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him an honorary member, and he is also a fellow of the American Physical Society. Professor Klafter has won many prestigious prizes in his field, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Prize, the Weizmann Prize for Sciences, the Rothschild Prize in Chemistry, and the Israel Chemical Society Prize. He holds an honorary doctorate from Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland, and received "Commander of the Order of the Star of Italy" award from the President of the Republic of Italy.
Professor Klafter has published close to 400 scientific articles, edited 18 books and is the co-author of First Steps in Random Walks: From Tools to Applications (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has been a member of the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals and a member of the scientific committees of dozens of conferences.Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland.
Professor Klafter completed his BSc and MSc in physics at Bar-Ilan University, and his PhD in chemistry at Tel Aviv University. After post-doctoral studies in chemistry at MIT, he joined the research and engineering division of Exxon in the US, where he worked for eight years.
He joined the TAU Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Chemistry in 1987, and was promoted to full professor in 1989. From 1998 to 2003 he was the incumbent of the Gordon Chair in Chemistry, and from 2003 onward he has held the Heineman Chair of Physical Chemistry. In January 2017, he was appointed as Head of the Association of University Presidents, Israel.
Prof. Yaron Oz
Prof. Yaron Oz was named the Rector of Tel Aviv University in 2015. He completed, summa cum laude, two BSc degrees in electrical engineering and in physics, an MSc and a PhD in physics at the Technion.
Professor Oz was a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. During the years 1998-2002, he worked as a staff member at the research institute CERN in Switzerland. He joined the Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University as a professor in 2001.
During 2006-2011, he served as Head of the Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy, and during 2011-2015, as Dean of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences at Tel Aviv University.
The research fields of Professor Oz are high energy particle physics, quantum field theories and supersymmetry, classical and quantum gravity and superstrings. He has made important contributions to those fields, publishing approximately 140 scientific papers and lecturing in about 150 international conferences.
professor, he lectured at numerous universities and research institutes, such as the College de France in Paris and the Simons Center in Professor Oz is the incumbent of the Yuval Neeman Chair in Physics. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and held the Chair of the ISF Research Center of Excellence in Basic Interactions. He has been the recipient of numerous research grants and is a member of the I-CORE in the Quantum Universe. He has supervised more than 40 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, and as invitedUS. Professor Oz has been a member of the scientific committees of many international conferences.
Professor Oz is the President of the Israel Physical Society, an Editor of the Journal of High Energy Physics, the Chair of the National Committee for Pure and Applied Sciences of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and a member of the National High Energy Committee.
Prof. Avigdor Abelson
A self-described “enthusiastic marine ecologist,” Prof. Abelson focuses on seeking solutions to the degradation of marine ecosystems and the resulting negative impact on ecosystem services for humans such as food supply, tourism, pharmaceuticals and coastal protection. His field of research includes restoration ecology, coral reef ecology, sustainable marine aquaculture, and marine bio-invasion. Prof. Abelson sees the ocean as a viable, sustainable source of food that could generate new jobs and help feed the increasingly growing human population.
Prof. Abelson has received diverse prizes and honors for his work, including two Landau Awards and Fulbright and Ben-Gurion Post-doctorate Awards. He is a member of, or consultant to, many environmental groups and government agencies, both in Israel and abroad. He has authored over 80 scientific papers on environmental issues and management.
Prof. Abelson received his MSc and PhD in Zoology with honors from TAU, and has been a visiting scientist to universities in the US, Brazil and the Philippines.
Vivi Astrinsky
Vivi Astrinsky Architects specializes in a wide range of fields, such as offices, libraries, public buildings, commercial projects and private homes. The firm provides tailormade solutions which are fitted to the customer’s needs, while committed to quality, from the early stage of sketches, through work plans and up to detailing. The office’s success is based upon clean design, preciseness and making customer service a top priority.
Vivi Astrinsky graduated the Technion in 1995. During her 22 year experience as an architect, Cellcom, Partner and HaPoalim Bank are among the projects she worked on as an employee.
During the last 13 years, her private office has designed many variety of projects. Some of them have been published in magazines in Israel and abroad.
Ms. Astrinsky was also a faculty member at the David Yellin College in Jerusalem and taught a course in the training of librarians at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
A few years ago, architect Vivi Astrinsky was chosen to lead the renovation of five libraries at Tel Aviv University, thus becoming the leading office in the field in Israel.
Among her customers you may find: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, Delek Motors, YES, CAL, Celeno, Technion, Safed College, Tel Aviv University, National Library of Israel, Ben-Gurion University, Rashi Foundation, Modiin Municipality, Kibbutzim College, a Residential Buildings Project in Kiryat Ye'arim, and more.
The Batsheva Dance Company
Batsheva Dance Company is one of the world’s foremost contemporary dance companies. It was founded in 1964 by the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, who engaged Martha Graham as the first Artistic Advisor. Together with the Young Ensemble, Batsheva comprises 40 dancers drawn from Israel and abroad. It gives over 250 performances to 100,000 spectators in Israel and abroad annually. Ohad Naharin, hailed as one of the world's leading contemporary choreographers, assumed the role of Artistic Director in 1990, propelling the company into a new era with his adventurous curatorial vision and distinctive choreographic voice. Naharin is also the originator of the movement language Gaga, which has revolutionized the company’s training and emerged as a growing international force in the larger field of movement practices.
Prof. Irad E. Ben-Gal
Irad Ben-Gal is a full professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Management at Tel Aviv University and the head of the new "AI and Business Analytics" Lab at the Faculty of Engineering. He is leading the "Digital Life 2030" research partnership with Stanford University, where he held a visiting professor position, teaching and conducting research in applied analytics. His research interests include machine learning and AI applications for industrial and service systems and methods for monitoring and analysis of complex processes. He wrote and edited five books, published more than 100 scientific papers and patents, supervised dozens of graduate students and received numerous “best paper” awards.
Prof. Ben-Gal has led numerous R&D projects in cooperation with top global companies such as Oracle, Intel, GM, AT&T, Applied Materials, Siemens, Kimberly Clark and Nokia. He has received several research grants and awards including from General Motors, IEEE, Israeli Prime Minister Office, Israel Scientific Foundation (ISF) and the European Community. He is a co-founder and the chairman of CB4 ("See Before"), a software startup backed by Sequoia Capital that provides advanced AI solutions to retail and service organizations, and serves in the advisory board of several startups.
Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef
Erez Ben-Yosef studied archaeology and geology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (B.A., B.Sc., M.Sc.) and archaeology and anthropology at the University of California, San Diego (M.A., Ph.D.). His doctoral dissertation, entitled “Technology and Social Process: Oscillations in Iron Age Copper Production and Power in Southern Jordan” was published in 2010 and presents results of six years of field and laboratory research on the copper mines of the southern Levant (Jordan and Israel). During 2010-2011 he carried out postdoctoral research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, focusing on the ancient copper mines of Cyprus and the application of slag material in geomagnetic research. Since 2011 he teaches at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and the Graduate Program in Archaeomaterials at Tel Aviv University.
Ben-Yosef has authored multiple research papers on archaeometallurgy, archaeomagnetism, and Iron Age archaeology of the Southern Levant. In 2012 he initiated the Central Timna Valley (CTV) Project – a multidisciplinary research into ancient copper production in the southwestern Aravah (Israel). The project is currently supported by the Israel Science Foundation, following four years of support of the EU Marie Curie Actions and a grant from the Yad Hanadiv Foundation (The Yizhar Hirschfeld Memorial Fellowship in Archaeology).
Prof. Judith Berman
Judith Berman is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and is a member of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology and the new School of Cellular Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. Prof. Berman is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Society for Microbiology and a recipient of the European Research Council Advanced Award. Prof. Berman uses yeasts, especially pathogenic yeasts, to address basic mechanisms that underlie the rapid appearance of new properties in microbes such as resistance to anti-microbial drugs. Berman trained in yeast molecular biology as a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel and as a post-doctoral fellow with Bik-kwoon Tye at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. After over 25 years as a Professor at the University of Minnesota, she moved to her new lab at Tel Aviv University, in Ramat Aviv, Israel in 2012.
Prof. Berman has studied many aspects of chromosome components including telomeres, the chromosome ends, centromeres, origins of replication and repeated DNA regions. She and her colleagues have developed and adapted many widely-used resources for the community of researchers studying pathogenic yeasts, including tools for analysis and visualization of the genome structure of individual isolates. The Berman lab recently discovered that C. albicans, long thought to have two copies of each chromosome, can exist in a haploid form (one copy of each chromosome) and as aneuploids (unusual numbers of specific chromosomes)—and that they form aneuploids via mechanisms analogous to those occurring in cancer cells.
Dr. Dmitry Borisovich Zimin
Dmitry Zimin is a professor of engineering at the State University – High School of Economics in Moscow. He holds a PhD in technical sciences from the Moscow Aviation Institute and, for over 35 years, held various leadership roles at the military-industrial Mintz Radio Technical Institute. Zimin is the former CEO and current Honorary President of mobile telecommunications company VimpelCom. For his extensive charitable endeavors, Zimin became the first Russian philanthropist to be awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2013. At Tel Aviv University, he recently established the Zimin Institute for Engineering Solutions Advancing Better Lives and previously launched a project at the Buchmann Faculty of Law in support of Israeli-Russian student exchange and the study of Russia law.
Prof. Carlo Croce
Prof. Carlo M. Croce is an Italian-American molecular geneticist and professor of medicine at Ohio State University. He is the director of Human Cancer Genetics, Chairman of Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics, and director of the Institute of Genetics at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is also professor of medical oncology at the University of Ferrara School of Medicine.
Prof. Croce has made major contributions to the understanding of the specific genetic bases of specific cancers. He is a pioneer in the unraveling of the molecular basis of a number of lymphoma and leukemia cancers. Mastering both cytogenetics and molecular biology, he identified the role of major oncogenes as drivers of cancer development, progression and resistance to therapy. His studies also demonstrated the role of micro RNAs in tumor pathogenesis. His numerous findings in cancer enable precise cancer diagnosis, individualized targeting of therapy and the development of novel rationally designed anti-cancer drugs.
Among his many awards he received, the Charles S. Mott Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation (1993,) the Scientific Excellence in Medicine Award from the American-Italian Cancer Foundation (1997), the Chauncey D. and Elizabeth W. Leake Speaker Award in 2014 and in 2015 the Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute. He was awarded by the American Association for Cancer Research both the G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award in 2006, and the Margaret Foti Award in 2017.
In 1999, Prof. Croce received the Raymond Bourgine Award and Gold Medal of Paris, and in 2000, the Honor of Merit of the Italian Republic. He was honored with The Henry M. Stratton Medal by the American Society of Hematology in 2007.
Prof. Croce is a member of The National Academy of Sciences, USA, the National Academy of Medicine, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Prof. Lorraine Daston
Prof. Lorraine Daston is an American historian of science, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), in Berlin, Germany. She serves as visiting professor for the Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago.
Prof. Daston’s work pursues a form of historical epistemology that focuses on basic categories of scientific rationality and their surprising changes over time and place. Her groundbreaking research on the “Ideals and Practices of Rationality”, has termed the basic categories of scientific investigation and accomplishment. Her meticulous historical studies of “reason,” “proof,” “fact,” “observation,” “scientific object,” “data”, and even “objectivity” itself, masterfully demonstrate how such seemingly universal concepts have changed dramatically since the seventeenth century.
She has published extensively on the history of probability theory, objectivity and scientific observation. Daston’s pursuit of the cultural history of rationality began with the leading role she played as one of the editors of the big project on The Probabilistic Revolution (2 volumes, 1987). Her first book, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, which won her widespread international praise followed quickly. That trajectory continued with Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, co-authored with Katharine Park. Her big 2007 book with Peter Galison, Objectivity, became one of the most discussed and reviewed works in the history of science, for its bold claims about dramatic changes in meaning that the concept of objectivity underwent during four historical epochs from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Prof. Daston has organized a series of Working Group volumes that address fundamental concepts and practices in the sciences, from observation to formal theories of rationality.
Among her many honors, she received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Princeton University in 2013, and the Sarton Medal for lifetime scholarly achievement from the History of Science Society in 2012. She was awarded the Pfizer Prize by the History of Science Society both in 1989 and 1999. She was inducted into the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010.
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, Paris, and is a Corresponding Member of the British Academy. She is also a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Ilana Dayan
Ilana Dayan-Orbach is an Israeli TV journalist who has, since 1993, anchored the award-winning, weekly investigative-news program Uvda (“Fact”). A TAU law alumna and member of the Israeli Bar Association, Dayan-Orbach holds an LLM and JSD from Yale Law School and is a former Fulbright Fellow. She began her journalistic career as a radio correspondent for IDF Radio in 1982, and has hosted a weekly current affairs program there since 1997. Her TV career began as the first-ever female news anchor for the daily TV interview program, “New Evening,” in 1987. Dayan-Orbach has lectured at TAU’s Buchmann Faculty of Law since 1993, where she teaches a course on freedom of speech. She was born in Argentina and moved to Israel with her family at age six.
Nathan Disenhouse
Nathan Disenhouse has spent the last 30 years providing complete and comprehensive financial advisory services to a wide range of clients in areas of insurance, specialized investments, and estate & tax planning. Mr. Disenhouse holds a Bachelor of Economics degree from York University in Toronto and has Life Insurance qualifications from the Life Underwriters Association of Canada. He is also an Associate of the Institute of Canadian Bankers (ICB).
Nathan has long and continues to be, an active member in the Toronto Jewish community. Nathan currently serves as Chair of the Canadian Friends of Tel-Aviv University for Ontario and Western Canada, and is a past President and Chair of JNF Toronto. Nathan presently serves as Vice President of JNF Canada, and is a past President of Toronto Hebrew Free Loan. Nathan has held Board and Executive committee positions with several non-profit organizations in Toronto, such as The Reena Foundation and Camp Ramah in Canada.been,
Nathan is passionate about all things Israel and strives to support the development and growth of Tel Aviv University
Prof. Ezekiel Emanuel
Prof. Ezekiel J. Emanuel is the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Emanuel was the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. From January 2009 until January 2011, he served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council in the Obama Administration.
Prof. Emanuel is renowned for advancing the field of bioethics by combining his skills as a physician, policymaker, and scholar. He is a pioneer in the field of end-of life care. His work emphasizes how psychological distress, depression and hopelessness rather than pain lead patients to want euthanasia of assisted suicide. His research has proven him a leader on research ethics, both in conceptual analysis as well as in discussing regulatory issues. His analysis of the physician patient relationship is a landmark widely taught throughout the world and used to educate medical students.
Emanuel has published over 300 scholarly articles and is the most cited bioethicist in the world. He has authored 6 books and edited 6 other books. Among his many praised books is Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System, and Healthcare, Guaranteed: A Simple, Secure Solution for America and his memoir Brothers Emanuel. He is also known for being the editor of The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics.
Prof. Emanuel is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the chair of the meta-council on the Future of Health Care Committee for the World Economic Forum. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the Royal College of Medicine (UK). He received numerous awards include the AMA-Burroughs Wellcome Leadership Award, the Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the John Mendelsohn Award from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Isaac Hays, MD and John Bell, MD Award for Leadership in Medical Ethics and Professionalism.
Dr. Ram Fishman
Ram Fishman is an Assistant Professor of public policy at Tel Aviv University. Prior to coming to TAU, Ram was an assistant professor of Economics at George Washington University, and prior to that, a Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Ram’s research is focused on sustainable agriculture, water scarcity and climate change, with an emphasis on developing countries. He has recently founded a research group at TAU that is running several empirical field projects Asia and Africa. For details, see nitsanlab.org
Ram holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, a M.Sc. in Physics from the Weitzman Institute and a B.Sc. in Mathematics from Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Karnit Flug
Dr. Karnit Flug has been Governor of the Bank of Israel since October 2013, after previously serving as Deputy Governor and Director of the Bank of Israel’s Research Department. She was born in Poland and made Aliyah with her parents at age three. Dr. Flug earned an MA in Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in Economics from Columbia University in the US. She joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1984 and the Research Department of the Bank of Israel in 1988. From 1994 to 1996, Dr. Flug was a Senior Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank before returning to Israel in 1997. She has been ranked among the top 10 central bankers in the world by Global Finance magazine.
Dr. Jason Friedman
Dr. Jason Friedman is a senior researcher in the Dept. Physical Therapy and a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience, at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on human motor control – understanding how the brain controls movement. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Jason moved to Israel after completing a B.Sc degree in Computer Science at Monash University. In Israel, he completed an M.Sc and Ph.D in Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, examining questions related to arm movements and grasping. Following postdoctoral research at Penn State University, USA in the Dept. Kinesiology, and in the Dept. Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, he returned to Israel to take up a position at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Physical therapy. Jason combines his computational background with a clinical approach, where he works on better understanding the basic processes of how we coordinate our movements and learn to produce new movements, how and why movements differ in movement disorders, and what are the optimal strategies for movement rehabilitation.
Maoz Gelbart
Maoz Gelbart is a third-year Ph.D. student in the direct Ph.D. track for outstanding students in the Life Sciences Faculty at Tel Aviv University (TAU). Maoz performs his Ph.D. studies under the supervision of Dr. Adi Stern. Maoz studies the evolution of viruses, with special focus on HIV and the ongoing "arms-race" between the viruses and their hosts. Maoz graduated with honors from the BSc program in Bioinformatics at TAU in 2011. After his graduation Maoz worked several years as data scientist in a Hi-Tech startup company, until he realized his passion for science and returned to the academia in 2015.
Tal Geller
Tal Geller is a student at Tel Aviv University currently pursuing his MSc in Industrial Engineering, specializing in Business Analytics. Tal is also a teaching assistant for “Computer Networks and Communications” and “Fundamental Technologies of Cyber Systems” courses.
Parallel to his studies, Tal works as a Product Analyst at Intel’s Advanced Analytics team, using Machine Learning, Big Data and Data Mining solutions to improve the company’s sales and marketing activities. Previously, Tal served for 3.5 years in the IDF Intelligence Force, leading various intelligence projects and operations. Tal received several awards for outstanding service, character and professionalism.
Tal’s research focuses on the development of a mathematical model for controlling and optimizing a Wireless Body Area Network composed of sensors, which assesses and predicts an individual’s health state. The research goal is to develop, implement and evaluate the use of Machine Learning techniques in order to optimize the model’s performance.
Dr. Amir Globerson
Amir Globerson is an associate professor in the Tel Aviv University computer science department. Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, he was a faculty member at the Hebrew University for seven years. Amir holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from the Hebrew University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and the University of Toronto. His research interests include machine learning, deep learning, graphical models, convex optimization, neural computation and natural language processing. He is an Associate Editor in Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and program co-chair for the conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 2018. His work has received several prizes including five paper awards, and he has received teaching awards at the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University.
Prof. Jonathan Glover
Prof. Jonathan Glover is a British philosopher, Professor Emeritus at Kings College London.
Prof. Glover has made seminal contributions to the theoretical aspects of bioethics. He has multiple milestones in his work that set the research agenda in many topics and in particular in Human Enhancement and Reproductive Ethics. His original research spans diverse topics such as human nature, war and the holocaust, genetic ethics, neuro-ethics, and psychiatric issues. The originality of his thought is marked by the role he plays in shaping the debates others will follow.
Jonathan Glover has written several books on ethics, including Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, and Causing Death and Saving Lives. He chaired a European Commission Working Party on Assisted Reproduction. He is interested in questions raised by the Human Genome Project. He is currently interested in a number of issues in global ethics and in ethical issues in psychiatry.
Glover is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution in the United States. Professor Glover is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Dr. Danny Gold
Brig. Gen. (Res.) Dr. Daniel Gold is the head of Defence Research and Development Directorate (DDR&D) Since July 2016.
Dr. Gold is in charge of Determining the military research and development policy for Israel including oversight of its execution. In Charge of all R&D, Technology infrastructure, full scale development, capabilities development including special directorates (Space, UAV’s, Missile/Rockets Defense), Hi-end manpower development for the defense organizations, etc.
Dr. Gold Holds 2 Ph.D’s which he has unprecedentedly completed concurrently within a period 2 years: Ph.D in Electronic Engineering and Ph.D in Business Management, Both from Tel-Aviv University.
He has held several positions as within IMOD and the Israel Air Force (IAF) including management of IMOD and IDF's main projects. Head of IMOD/IDF R&D unit, Head of the main UAV/Drones projects, Head of Electronics &Electronic Warfare, Head of Armament & Avionics.
After leaving active duty in the IDF/IMOD, As a private citizen he have founded “Gold R&D Technology and Innovation LTD” company, and was its CEO. The firm have offered both consultancy and business -technology ventures & development. It was also involved in the development of various inter & cross- disciplinary areas from technology aspects, companies size aspects, innovation stage aspects and business aspects (local & international cooperation and market capturing). Examples of the areas of Dr. Gold company: R&D management, Innovation, Cyber security, smart/safe cities, Home Land Security, Mobile technology & communication, commercial drones, etc.
In addition, Dr. Gold is the Head of the Israel National Committee for Commercial/Civilian Cyber R&D and he is a Board member of Israel Brain Technology (IBT) Organization.
Dr. Gold was awarded the 2012 Israel Defense Prize for his initiation and management of the “Iron Dome” missiles/rockets defense system. Under his leadership, the R&D unit was awarded the Israel Defense Prize 8 times.
Dr. Gold was personally awarded several times for his technical-operational innovations, which led to exceptional capabilities of the armed forces. He is a four time recipient of the Israeli Air Force Prize and was also awarded the Singapore Defense Technology Distinguished Fellowship (SDTDF) Award. Selected “the man of the year” of 2012 by Forbes Magazine-Israel, Dr. Gold was also selected as one of The Top People Positively Influencing Jewish Life. He was also selected to be in the Top inspiring & influencing Israelis, awarded 2014 “Knight of Government Quality” prize, the “Courage” prize, the 2012 Israel Defense Prize.
Dr. Gold was selected to light the torch during the opening of Israel Independence Day 2015.
In a national competition, on the occasion of Israel's 70th Anniversary set by the Ministry of Economy and Industry, Iron Dome - founded by Dr. Gold, was selected as The Most Innovative Israeli Technology of all Times, since the establishment of the State of Israel.
Dr. Tomer Goodovitch
Dr. Goodovitch is a Geographer and Technologist providing consulting and project management services to local and international companies. Among them it is worth mentioning Egis Rail for the Tel Aviv Metro project, Ministry of Transport for rail regulation, Tel Aviv University Master Plan and local authorities, such as Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. Between 2002 to 2010 he was serving in Veolia Environnement Israel (a subsidiary of Veolia France), where he was fulfilling variety of positions in transport and energy environmental solutions, most notable as the General Manager of Veolia Transportation with 200 bus operations; Board member and Executive Officer of City Pass Consortium (the Jerusalem LRT project) and in Veolia Transportatyion US for the Houston Metro project.
Dr. Goodovitch was having both an academic and consultancy career between the years 1994-2002. He was serving as an Assistant Professor at Tel Aviv University, the Department of Geography. Among his interests were public facilities and land-use location that serve national or regional development policy, such as casino, airport and public transit. His research areas include: operations research in transportation, the economics and management of transport systems and airlines and airport related location problems. Dr. Goodovitch was the founder of private consulting company specializing in operations research in transportation and airline business, which was providing services among others to Arkia Israeli Airlines, El Al, Ministry of Tourism the Mayor of Tel Aviv on urban and transportation policies, feasibility studies, market research, transportation planning and urban and environment planning.
At the beginning of his career (1992-1994) Tomer was a Senior Planner at IITPR (The Israeli Institute of Transportation Planning and Research) working on transportation and land-use models, network optimization and economic feasibility studies. He was serving as the Director of The Transportation Lab at the University of Pennsylvania (1989-1990) and a Planner at Motorola Israel cellular phone project during his studies (1996-1987).
Prof. Iftah Haitner
graduated from Weizmann Institute of Science in 2008; his advisor was Omer
Reingold. His thesis focused on foundation of cryptography. He lives at Ramat Hsahron,
Israel, enjoys open water swimming and payback theatre.
Prof. Israel Hershkovitz
One of the world's leading anthropologists with more than 40 years of field experience
Professor, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University
Head of the Dan David Laboratory for the Search and Study of Modern Humans
Current Research: the origin of anatomically modern humans and the fate of the Neanderthals. By studying new fossils excavated in the last years (including their DNA) at Qesem cave, Misliya cave, Nesher and Manot cave, he and his teams hope to shed light on key issues relating to the origin and spread of anatomically modern humans.
Prof. Evelyn Fox Keller
Evelyn Fox Keller is Professor Emerita of History and Philosophy of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Throughout her career, she has pushed the boundaries of science, confidently crossing the borders that separate disciplines both within the sciences, and between the sciences and the humanities. She has also fought to break down the barriers keeping women out of the highest reaches of scientific achievement.
Her pioneering work on language, gender, and science has been hugely influential on shaping our views of the history of science. Fox Keller has extensively examined the role of language in the History of Science, and more specifically, in genetics and molecular biology, interrogating the historical legacy embedded in scientific language. Furthermore, her early insights into the relation between language, gender and science helped both to reveal many of the obstacles to the pursuit of science faced by women, and to begin to envision what a gender-free science might look like.
She has authored a number of books, including A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock, Reflections on Gender and Science, The Century of the Gene, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines, and The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture.
Among her numerous awards Prof. Fox Keller has received over a dozen honorary degrees from prestigious institutions, including The University of King’s College, Smith College, Dartmouth College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Amsterdam.
Prof. Fox Keller is also a MacArthur Fellow and the recipient of the Bernal Prize for the Social Studies of Science in 2011. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the American Philosophical Society and serves on the editorial boards of various journals including the Journal of the History of Biology, and Biology and Philosophy.
Prof. Mary-Claire King
Mary-Claire King, PhD, is American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Medicine (Division of Medical Genetics) and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Prof. King is a molecular geneticist and a world leader in human genetics. She has made major contributions to the study of the molecular causes of common complex human disease. Her seminal finding was the demonstration of inherited predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer as the result of mutations in a single gene, which she named BRCA1. This game-changing discovery led to the understanding of hereditary cancer predisposition and revolutionized clinical approaches to screening for inherited cancer risk, to individualizing interventions, and to tailoring rational therapy.
Prof. King’s research interests also include the genetic bases of schizophrenia, the genetic causes of congenital disorders in children, and human evolution. She also pioneered the use of DNA sequencing for human rights investigations.
Prof. King has received honorary degrees from some of the world’s most prominent institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, and Tel Aviv Universities.
Among her honors, Prof. King received the Peter Gruber Foundation Genetics Prize in 2004, the AH Heineken Prize for Medicine from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, the Lasker Foundation Special Achievement Award for Medical Research in 2014, and the United States National Medal of Science in 2016.
Prof. King is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, the American Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of the French Academy of Sciences. She served on the governing council of the National Academy of Sciences and on multiple committees and councils for the National Institutes for Health.
Etan Kimmel
Co-Founder, Kimmel Eshkolot Architects
Graduate of The Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 1985.
Co-founder of Kimmel-Eshkolot Architects in 1986.
Senior Lecturer at The Technion Faculty of Architecture, Haifa, since 2002.
Lecturer at The Faculty of Architecture, Tel Aviv University, 2005-2012.
Guest lecturer at The Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, Netherlands, 2009.
Prof. Noga Kronfeld-Schor
Prof. Noga Kronfeld-Schor is the Chair of the School of Zoology and the head of the Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology Laboratory at Tel Aviv University. She is a Fulbright, Rothschild and Alon fellow, and a Gutwirth Research Prize winner. She published over 100 papers which were cited over 3000 times, and mentored over 50 graduate students and post-docs. Her research focuses on mechanisms and adaptive significance of biological rhythms (both daily and annual), light pollution, and ecology of thermoregulation.
Dr. Luis Alberto Lacalle de Herrera
Dr. Luis Alberto Lacalle de Herrera was President of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay between 1990 and 1995. A former journalist and a graduate of the Law School of the University of the Republic, he served as deputy for Montevideo from 1971 until the 1973 military coup when parliament was dissolved. After democracy was restored in 1984, Herrera was elected Senator and later Vice President of the Senate. Over the years, he has actively spoken out and published in defense of the State of Israel. He is a founder and member of the Friends of Israel Initiative – a group of high-level individuals who promote Israel’s right to exist within secure borders and counteract the growing efforts to delegitimize it. He has received a string of prestigious accolades, among them a knighthood from the Queen of England, the Jerusalem Prize and national medals from Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Spain.
Dr. Lia Levin
Dr. Lia Levin is a Senior faculty member at Tel Aviv University's School of Social Work. In her research and practice, she deals with issues pertaining to social justice, access to it and the ways in which it can be translated into benefiting policies in Western welfare states.
Dr. Levin is a licensed social worker, and received her BSW, MSW (Summa Cum Laude) and Ph.D. degrees from Tel Aviv University. In 2012-2013, she completed her post-doctoral fellowship at King College London's Centre for Public Policy Research, and holds a joint appointment as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Centre since 2013. To date, Dr. Levin has published several articles, book chapters and other texts on social policy, poverty, practice in social work and teaching social work in the world's leading academic journals and publications. She is regularly invited to undertake international projects and speak at conferences, in order to present her research and the conceptual models she has developed. She also supervises numerous research students on these topics. Dr. Levin has received research grants and awards, including a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (in 2017, as a single PI, dealing with citizen involvement in municipal policy making). She has also received awards for excellence in teaching at Tel Aviv University, consistently since 2010.
Since 2014, Dr. Levin is the Academic Director of Tel Aviv University's Policy Practice Clinic. The clinic's main goal is to impart knowledge and skills to its graduates so that they may influence social policy, conceptualize and consolidate theoretical and practical models in the area of social policy practice in Israel, and link and interconnect academic, government, and civil institutions and organizations that wish to promote a social-democratic agenda and help realize the role of the State of Israel as a welfare state. In this capacity, in 2017 she received a research grant reward from Israel's Council for Higher Education.
Dr. Levin has been the Head of Tel Aviv University's School of Social Work Bachelor's Degree Program since 2016.
Besides her academic endeavors and with relation to them, Dr. Levin continuously aspires to translate knowledge into positive social impact, working with individuals living in extreme poverty, acting as consultant to governmental and non-governmental agencies and conducting forums on the subjects of civic participation, society, social exclusion, social justice and participatory democracy.
Professor László Lovász
Born in Budapest in 1948, László Lovász is a mathematician best known for his work in combinatorics, graph theory and theoretical computer science. A math prodigy already in high school, he won gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad for three years running (1964-1966) and published his first scientific paper when he was just 17. Lovász is a member of the Department of Computer Science at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and former director of its Mathematical Institute. He has been a visiting professor at leading institutions including Yale, Princeton, Cornell and Berkeley, and a senior researcher at the Microsoft Research Center. Among numerous awards and high honors, Lovász holds the Wolf Prize and the Kyoto Prize, and serves as President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has published 4 textbooks and over 300 scientific papers.
Baroness Mary Warnock
Baroness Mary Warnock, is an English philosopher of morality, and education and mind.
Baroness Warnock is honored for her leading role in the development of practical bioethics, specifically for her progressive and unparalleled contribution to the ethics of embryology and genetics and their ethical and philosophical implication, reproductive technologies, and disability studies. Dame Mary helped to enhance the welfare of society by breaking the boundaries between academic and enacted ethics.
Baroness Warnock has produced a series of more than 13 monographs of the first quality over 55 years, from Ethics since 1900, through Women Philosophers, Dishonest to God, and Critical Reflections on Ownership. However her seminal and unparalleled achievement was The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology 1984, which she chaired and guided through to legislation and adoption. This work established a framework for a national consensus (in the UK) on embryo research and proposed the so-called “14 day rule” for a permissible window of ethical embryo experimentation. It heralded the setting up of a permanent licensing and review body: The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. The 14-day rule has been adopted in most research intensive nations and has been critical in the flourishing of embryology globally and in the birth of many millions of healthy children world-wide through the various methods of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART).
It was not only the force of Mary Warnock’s rational advocacy, but her heroic consensus building, both in parliament in the U.K., in society and globally that has permanently changed both the face of science and the agenda of bioethics.
Dr. Hila May
Dr. Hila May is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University Laboratory. Her research interests include Bio-History and Evolutionary Medicine: Inter-disciplinary laboratory focusing on two major topics: evolutionary history of anatomical systems and their impact on current population health, and reconstruction of ancient populations’ daily life, based on their skeletal remains, with emphasis on the interaction between genetic and socio-cultural factors.
Dafna Meitar-Nechmad
An Israeli, living in Tel Aviv, married with three daughters and one grandson.
Over the last twelve years Dafna is managing the Zvi & Ofra Meitar Family Fund which supports cultural and educational projects in Israel, including the Zvi Meitar center for advanced studies at the Tel Aviv University Law Faculty, the Meitar Opera Studio- the young singers' program of the Israeli Opera, the Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary center, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society in Musrara, Jerusalem.
In recent years Dafna invested most of her time in cultivating philanthropy in Israel. She is a board member of Jewish Funders Network, a member of Committed to Give, an initiative of major Israeli philanthropies to encourage giving in the Israeli society and a proud founder of the institute for Law and Philanthropy at the Tel Aviv University law faculty.
She seats at the boards of the Metropolitan opera in New York and the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center since 2014.
In addition, Dafna is the president of the Meitar Collection Ltd, a private company that owns, preserves, catalogues, and lends more than 100,000 historic photographs taken in Israel since the 1940s.
From 1989 to 2006, she was a partner at Meitar, Liquornik, Geva Leshem, Tal, today the largest law firm in Israel, where she specialized in commercial, telecommunications and corporate law.
Dafna has an LLB (Law) a BA in political science, and an MA in political communications, all from the Tel Aviv University.
Prof. David Mendlovic has received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, Israel where he is a Full Professor of electro-optics. He has authored more than 200 technical articles, 3 book chapters, and is the holder of more than 40 patents all of them have been commercialized.
He is a founder of successful opto-electronics startup companies (e.g. Civcom and Eyesquad) and served as their CEO. Civcom Inc. was acquired by Padtec S/A of Brazil, Eyesquad was acquired by Tessera Inc (NASDAQ symbol: TSRA). Prof. Mendlovic founded Corephotonics where he serves as the CEO. Recently he founded Unispectral which is a spin-off of Tel Aviv University.
Since January 2008 till December 2010, Prof. Mendlovic was the Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Science. He also acted 6 years as the Co-Chair of GIF. At present he serves as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Engineering. He also gathers the new Tel Aviv University Center for Entrepreneurship and serves as the Head of Zimin Institute for Engineering Solutions Advancing Better Lives.
Prof. David Mendlovic
Prof. Noam Mizrahi
Prof. Noam Mizrahi is an internationally leading scholar in the field of Hebrew philology, and the current Chair of the Department of Biblical Studies at Tel Aviv University. His numerous studies seek to illuminate the interconnection between diverse aspects of ancient Hebrew literature, drawing particularly on textual criticism and historical linguistics of both biblical and post-biblical literature, with special attention to the Dead Sea Scrolls. His most recent book, Witnessing a Prophetic Text in the Making (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017) explores the compositional history of a key prophetic unit in the biblical book of Jeremiah in light of its divergent versions and textual formations. He is now working on a new book, which presents a new edition and commentary of one of the most important scrolls found in Qumran, Pesher Habakkuk, which represents a special form of sectarian commentary of biblical prophecy.
Many of Prof. Mizrahi’s studies are devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are one of the most exciting archaeological discoveries made in the Middle East. The scrolls are actually the remains of thousands of ancient manuscripts unearthed at various sites in the Judean Desert; the main collection stems from caves surrounding the ancient site of Qumran, while other, smaller collections were found in places like Masada. These texts reflect the spiritual plurality and ideological controversies of the late Second Temple (or Greco-Roman) period, which was the formative era both for classical Judaism and nascent Christianity. As a result, the scrolls shed unprecedented light on the origins of Western civilization. Unfortunately, however, the original manuscripts disintegrated into fragments, some of which were lost while others have been hopelessly scrambled. The Qumran scrolls, for instance, have broken into ~25,000 such fragments of various sizes. The task of sorting, identifying, joining and ordering them is formidable. Prof. Mizrahi is engaged in several cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary projects—in cooperation with scientists specializing in paleo-genomics and computer science—that develop innovative techniques for coping with these challenges.
Prof. Dan Peer
Dan Peer is a Professor and the Director of the Laboratory of Precision NanoMedicine at Tel Aviv University (TAU) funded by the US NIH and the European Union via ERC grant. Prof. Peer is also the Chair of Tel Aviv University Cancer Biology Research Center; the biggest Cancer Center in Israel that includes 17 affiliated hospitals. In addition, he heads the new SPARK program (Center for Translational Medicine) at TAU.
Prof. Peer’s work was among the first to demonstrate systemic delivery of RNA molecules using targeted nanocarriers to the immune system and he pioneered the use of RNA interference (RNAi) for in vivo validation of new drug targets within the immune system that has enormous implications in blood cancer and inflammation.
Prof. Peer received more than 30 awards; among them, he was recognized by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation by their Innovator (2010) and Breakthrough (2011 – 2013) Awards for his pioneering work in inflammatory bowel diseases and by the AAAS and the Untold news breakthrough Award for his development of the Gagomers platform for cancer targeted drug delivery. In 2017, he received the 2017 Nanos Award for major contribution to the field of clinical nanomedicine in CLINAM 10th, Basal, Switzerland.
Prof. Peer has more than 90 pending and granted patents. Some of them have been licensed to several pharmaceutical companies and one is currently under registration (as a new drug in inflammatory bowel disease). In addition, based on his work, five spin-off companies were generated aiming to bring innovative personalized medicine into clinical practice. Three of them are in clinical stage companies.
Prof. Peer is a past Present of the Israeli Chapter of the Controlled Release Society, and a Member of the Israel Young Academy of Science.
Lili Peyser-Racine
Born in Paris in 1939, Lili Peyser-Racine is an Israeli philanthropist, TAU Governor and an active member of the World WIZO leadership. Lili and her family fled to the south of France during the Nazi occupation; her parents joined the Jewish underground, forged documents and smuggled Jewish children into Switzerland. In 1952 the family immigrated to Israel where Lili’s father established the Delek oil company. In the 1990s, Lili and her sister took over management of the family charity established by their father. Lili joined TAU’s Israeli Friends Association and has since supported numerous projects advancing needy students, young researchers, lab equipment and, most recently, the Entrance Plaza at the TAU Botanic Garden. Lili is a committee member of the Knesset Speakers` Quality of Life Prize and the Azrieli College in Jerusalem.
Professor Uzi Rabi
Professor Uzi Rabi, Ph.D (Tel Aviv University, 2000) is the Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, and a senior researcher at the Center for Iranian Studies, both at Tel Aviv University. Formerly, he was the Head of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. From 2004-2005, he held a visiting professorship at the Lipinski Institute of San Diego State University.
Prof. Rabi is the director of the TAU Workshop, an annual ten-day seminar for international scholars that focuses on the geopolitical situation of Israel and its neighbors, and the co-editor of Bustan: The Middle East Book Review. His research focuses on the modern history and evolution of states and societies in the Middle East, Iranian-Arab relations, oil and politics in the Middle East, and Sunni-Shi’i dynamics; within this framework he has supervised the dissertations of numerous doctoral candidates in this field over the years.
Richard Quest
Richard Quest is CNN's foremost international business correspondent and host of Quest Means Business, which airs Monday to Friday at 4pm ET / 9pm BST on CNN International.
Dr. Tal Raviv
Tal Raviv is a senior lecturer in the department of Industrial Engineering at the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Israel. He holds a BA from the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University (1993), an MBA from the Recanati School of Business, Tel Aviv University (1997), and a PhD in Operations Research from the William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa (2003). He spent two years (2004-2006) as a postdoctoral fellow in the Sauder School of Business at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His current main research interest is on smart transportation and logistics with a focus on sustainable logistics and shared mobility systems.
Prof. Dana Ron-Goldreich
Dana Ron received her Ph.D from the Hebrew University in 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 she was an NSF Postdoc at MIT. During the academic year 1997-8 she was a Bunting science scholar at Radcliffe and MIT. Since 1998 she is a faculty member at the Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University. During the academic year 2003-4 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Her research focuses on Sublinear Approximation algorithms and in particular Property Testing.
Dr. Rachel Sarig
Specialist in Orthodontics and Dentist
Lecturer, School of Dental Medicine, Tel Aviv University
Head of the Facial and Dental Anthropology Laboratory
Current Research: the evolution of the masticatory system, (i.e., teeth, jaws and muscles) in relation to nutrition and cultural habits. Dr. Sarig is involved in the identification of early hominins by examination of unique morphological features of teeth, using 3D geometric-morphometrics method. Dr. Sarig studies the effect of evolutionary and environmental changes on oral health in prehistoric populations and their implications on modern societies .
Prof. Simon Schaffer
Simon J. Schaffer is a Professor of the History of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge. Prof. Schaffer’s work has transformed our understanding of science in history by consistently targeting key issues, and probing the limits of current debate. His work spans a remarkable chronological and geographical range, from seventeenth to the twentieth century, and from London and Beijing to Parramatta and Paris. Prof. Schaffer’s impressive body of work demonstrates how experiment can no longer be seen as the mere testing of theories, but is located in witnessing, trust and acquired skill. His work exposes how major junctures in the history of science are firmly fixed in the localities of commercial exchange, political negotiation, and the activities of everyday life.
Prof. Schaffer authored numerous books, including Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life with Steven Shapin. He was editor of The British Journal for the History of Science. In addition to his work at Cambridge, he has been a presenter on the BBC, in particular the series Light Fantastic broadcast on BBC Four in 2004.
Among his awards and prizes, in 2005 he shared the prestigious Erasmus Prize with Steven Shapin for Leviathan and the Air-Pump. In 2013 he received the most prestigious honor awarded by the History of Science Society, the Sarton Medal, in recognition of his "lifetime of scholarly achievement," and in 2015 the Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum. He received the Paul Bunge Award from the German Chemical Society in 2017. Prof. Schaffer is a fellow of the British Academy.
Prof. Ron Shamir
Prof. Ron Shamir received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1984, and since 1987 he has been on the faculty of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University (TAU). His group develops novel algorithms in bioinformatics and systems biology for understanding the genome and human disease. Prof. Shamir holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics. He founded the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at TAU, and is heading it since 2005. The Center encompasses today 38 research groups totaling over 150 researchers in four faculties. He has published more than 280 scientific works, including 17 books and edited volumes, and has supervised more than 50 research students. He has been on the editorial board of twelve scientific journals and series. He co-founded the BSc and MSc programs in Bioinformatics at TAU, and was on the steering committee of RECOMB, the leading theoretical conference in bioinformatics for its first twelve years. He co-founded the Israeli Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and was society president in 2004-2006. He is a recipient of the Landau Prize in Bioinformatics, and a Fellow of the ISCB and the ACM. In 2017 he won the Kadar family prize for excellence in research.
Prof. Shamir collaborates with leading biomedical researchers on method development and data analysis. Among his collaborators in Berkeley are Profs. Richard Karp and Michael Jordan (CS). In 2016 he organized a semester-long program at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley. The program, Algorithmic Challenges in Genomics, brought together over forty leading scientists for the semester and several hundreds more for four topical workshops.
Prof. Guy Stiebel
Guy D. Stiebel is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University and Head of the Neustadter archaeological expedition to Masada. He did his undergraduate degree in archaeology and philosophy (1991) and MA studies in archaeology at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem (1994). He thereafter earned his MPhil in classical archaeology at UCL, London (1997) and a PhD in classical archaeology at UCL for the dissertation: Armis et litteris – The Military Equipment of Early Roman Palestine in Light of the Archaeological and Historical Sources (2007). His postdoctoral fellowship at Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2007-2011), was devoted to the research: Aspects of realia in the War Scroll (1QM). Between 1995 and 2010 he served as the co-director of the excavations at Masada, alongside (the late) Prof. Ehud Netzer. As from 2017 Stiebel serves as the head of the archaeological expedition to Masada, on behalf of Tel-Aviv University. He was recently granted the Shanghai Archaeological Forum 2017 for Field Discovery Award (1 of 10 sites in the world) for the study: Aqua Regis – King Herod's Usage of Water at Masada.
He has written extensively about military archaeology and history, martial material culture, Roman Jerusalem, as well as on the interface between historical texts and archaeology. In recent years his research was devoted to the archaeology of refuges in times of crisis and to the archaeology of abundance and its manifestations in gardens and water installations in the Roman East. Stiebel is a member of the Israel Milestones Committee (IMC) and the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society (AIAS) Committee, London. He is a co-editor and member of the editorial committees of several refereed Journals.
Professor Knut W. Urban
Physicist Prof. Knut Urban gained his PhD from the University of Stuttgart in 1972 and subsequently joined the Max Planck Institute of Metals Research. He served as Director of the Institute of Microstructure Research at Jülich Research Center, one of the largest interdisciplinary research centers in Europe, from 1987 to 2010. He was also one of two founding directors of the Ernst Ruska Center for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons in 2004. Prof. Urban is former president of the German Physical Society and a current member of several advisory bodies, boards of trustees and scientific committees. His prestigious research awards include the MRS von Hippel Award, the HONDA Prize for Ecotechnology, and the Wolf Prize in Physics. He is the Yuval Neeman Distinguished Lecturer at Tel Aviv University.
Prof. Bert Vogelstein
Prof. Bert Vogelstein, M.D., is the Director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Prof. Bert Vogelstein is recognized for his seminal contributions to the understanding of cancer genetics and genomics. His pioneering studies on colon cancer demonstrated that cancer results from a defined series of sequential genetic alterations. He was instrumental in the identification and characterization of tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes. HIs group was the first to describe the genomic landscapes of human cancers through sequencing analysis of all genes within the human genome. He concomitantly developed a variety of new technologies for assessing the genetic alterations driving tumorigenesis. Such approaches have led to tests for genetic susceptibility to cancer, early diagnosis, and individualized therapies based on the genetic alterations within patients' cancers.
Prof. Vogelstein’s many honors include the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research (1990), the Shacknai Memorial Prize from Hebrew University (1993), the Cancer, Aids, & Immunology Research Institute Award from Bar-Ilan University (1996), the Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences (1993), the William Allan Award from the American Scoiety of Human Genetics (1998), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (1999), the Harvey Prize in Human Health from The Technion, Haifa (2001), the Pasarow Award in Medical Research (2008), The Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Prize for Cancer Research(2010), The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013), the Warren Triennial Prize from the Massachusetts General Hospital (2014), Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research in 2015 and the Bob Pinedo Cancer Care Award by The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences (2016).
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Human Genetics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science. His advisory roles have included Chairman of the National Research Council Committee on the Biological and Biomedical Applications of Stem Cell Research and the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He has also held editorial positions at Science, Molecular Cell, Cancer Cell and The New England Journal of Medicine.
Arkady Yurievich Volozh
Arkady Yurievich Volozh is a Russian technology entrepreneur, investor, computer scientist, and philanthropist, best known as the founder and CEO of Yandex. Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning; it is one of Europe's largest Internet companies, operating Russia's most popular search engine. Volozh co-founded several successful IT enterprises and in his early days, he pioneered the development of search with new technology advancements and search software companies.
Dave (Shahar) Waiser
Dave (Shahar) Waiser is a serial entrepreneur who founded and built companies in US and
Internationally.
In early 2000 – He founded Russian entity of publicly traded Comverse [NASDAQ:CMVT] and
served as its first CEO with a $300M record in total sales.
In 2005 - Moved to San Francisco, where he spent five years building his new start-up called
Loyalize (acquired by Viggle [VGGL]). Loyalize technology had been used during the SuperBowl, Australian Open, Grammys, and Oscars.
In 2010 - He founded Gett (previously GetTaxi) operating in 100 cities worldwide,
including: New York, London, Moscow, and Tel-Aviv.
Gett raised $640 million in venture funding, including $300M from Volkswagen Group, and was
selected by FORBES as one of the fastest growing companies.
Ma Yun (Jack Ma)
Jack Ma is lead founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group. He is a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, an advocate of UN Sustainable Development Goals and special adviser to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development for Youth Entrepreneurship and Small Business. Ma graduated from Hangzhou Teacher's Institute with a major in English language education. Having spent six years as a teacher, he is strongly influenced by his past career. In his view, CEO means “Chief Education Officer.” In 1995, Ma founded China’s first online business directory, China Pages, and in 1999, he led a team to establish Alibaba.com with the goal of helping small businesses. Alibaba Group now serves tens of millions of small businesses and entrepreneurs around the globe through e-commerce, online financial services, cloud computing and smart logistics. Ma set up the Jack Ma Foundation, which focuses on philanthropic initiatives in the areas of education, environmental protection, poverty alleviation and entrepreneurship.
Dame Shirley Porter
After making aliya in 1993, Dame Shirley and (the late) Sir Leslie Porter embraced the Cohen-Porter family’s long-standing support of the University. They assumed various leadership positions, including Sir Leslie's role as Chancellor, and most recently, Dame Shirley’s as Deputy Chairman of the Board of Governors.
The Porters brought unique experiences to the university including Dame Shirley’s years as a London Magistrate, as a member of the Westminster Council then as Council Leader and, subsequently, Lord Mayor of Westminster. Among other continued involvement in the UK, Dame Shirley presently serves as a trustee for the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Dame Shirley, who served as Chairman of the Highways and Works Committee on the Westminster Council and received the prestigious Keep Britain Tidy Award, has for decades co-chaired the Campus Development and Maintenance Committee at TAU, overseeing the expansion of buildings and facilities on campus while promoting environmental sustainability and the preservation of its quiet serenity.
The Porter name is synonymous with TAU's advancement, most significantly the iconic Porter School of Environmental Studies, the first LEED Platinum accreditation, in Israel, of the US Green Building Council, the leading standard for green building worldwide. Recently, the Porter University Research Institute was inaugurated at the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea, while simultaneously the Porter Foundation is helping TAU reach for the stars, supporting an initiative to build a centre for two nano-satellites to be used by the University’s scientific community.
Dame Shirley is proud to have passed on her passion for TAU to her children and granddaughter, all of whom are active governors.
Prof. Assaf Pinkus
Assaf Pinkus is an art historian and Chair of the Art History Department at Tel Aviv University (2012-2016), Director of the University Gallery (2013-2016|), Co-Head of the Photography Studies Program (2012-2016), Founder and Chair of the Tel Aviv Israeli Art Foundation, Chair of IMAGO – The Israeli Association for Visual Culture of the Middle Ages and since 2018 Chair of the Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Programs in the Arts. His research focuses on Parler sculpture and trecento painting. In 2002 he completed his PhD with distinction at Tel Aviv University, discussing the sculptural programs of St. Theobald in Thann (Workshops and Patrons of St. Theobald in Thann [Münster: Waxmann, 2006]). From 2004 to 2006 Pinkus was a postdoctoral fellow at Freiburg University, where he embarked on a broader project dedicated to the Parler tympana at Augsburg, Freiburg, Schwäbisch Gmünd, Thann, and Ulm, concentrating on aspects of narrativity and spectatorship of late medieval sculpture (Patrons and Narratives of the Parler School [Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009]). The book was awarded a distinguished grant by the VGWort. In 2018 he was teaching at Vienna University. His last book, Sculpting Simulacra in Medieval Germany, 1250–1380 [Farnham: Ashgate, 2014]), investigates the potential of an intuitive, imaginative, non-religious response to late medieval art, the research for which was carried out in collaboration with the Art History Institute at Vienna University. His new book, Visual Aggression: Martyrs Imagery in Late Medieval Germany (will appear Pennsylvania State University, 2019), engages with soma-aesthetics and bodily response to violent imagery. Pinkus’s recent study focuses on the material culture and technology of late medieval wood sculpture. In addition, he works on colossal sculpture and the notion of “the Gigantic” in late medieval art. He has published articles in such prestigious journals as Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Viator, Arte medievale, Gesta, and Speculum.
Grants: Among the grants awarded: Minerva Scholarship by the Max Planck Gesellschaft, Alon Fellowship, GIF Young Scientists, VGWort, ISF, the prestigious Gerda Henkel Stiftung grant for a joint project with Frankfurt University, and most recently the Kadar Prize.