Prof. Haim Harari was born in Jerusalem in 1940. He became an Associate Professor at the Weizmann Institute at the age of 26, the youngest ever, and was promoted to Professor three years later. Since 1999, he is an "Institute Professor". He made several major contributions to Particle Physics and, in 1975, was the first to synthesize the full "standard model" of six quarks and six leptons in its present form.
Prof. Harari served as President of the Weizmann Institute from 1988 to 2001, prior to which he served as Chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of Israel's Council for Higher Education (1979-1985), the body which distributes all Government funding for Higher Education and Basic Research.
In the field of education, Prof. Harari served as a Dean of the Graduate School of the Weizmann Institute (1972-1978), and was a co-Founder of "Perach", a national tutoring program for underprivileged children in Israel, which was awarded the 2008 Israel Prize. He initiated and led the establishment of unique educational Institutions, including the Davidson Institute of Science Education and the HEMDA Science Center in Tel Aviv, whose Boards he chaired until 2016.
Prof. Harari is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and won the Rothschild Prize and the Israel Prize in Physics, the "EMET" Prize in Education, several honorary doctorates and other prizes, medals of honor from Germany and Austria, and the Harnack Medal of the Max Planck Society.
Prof. Harari is a member of the Institute’s Executive Board, the Chairman of the Management Committee of W-GEM and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Institute of Science and Technology-Austria. He served as member of International Advisory Boards of SwissRe and DaimlerChrysler.