Speakers

Dr. Naomi Azrieli has been Chair of the Board of Directors and Executive Director of the Azrieli Foundation since 2002.

In this capacity, she has established the Azrieli Foundation as a force for creative and effective philanthropy in a number of fields, and as one of the premier charitable organizations in Canada. She has created and launched several programs, including the Azrieli Institute for Educational Empowerment, the Azrieli Fellows Program and the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Publishing Program. She serves as a Senior Editor for the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs, and has edited and written introductions for several of the volumes published in the series.

Dr. Azrieli holds a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford (UK), and has written and lectured on European diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, on the economic aspects of totalitarian regimes, on Soviet foreign policy during and just following World War II, and on the origins of the Cold War.

Dr. Shikma Bressler was born and raised in the Jezreel Valley. She completed her BSc summa cum laude in physics and mathematics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 2003, followed by her MSc cum laude in physics in 2006, and PhD in 2011. In 2012, Dr. Bressler joined the Weizmann Institute of Science as a postdoctoral fellow and in 2013 was hired as a scientist to form a particle physics and detector development team. In 2015 she joined the faculty in the Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics and today heads the Kushner Family Particle Detector Laboratory.

As a high-energy experimental physicist, Dr. Bressler is an active member of the ATLAS collaboration at the large hadron collider at CERN that “discovered” evidence of the Higgs boson.  Although this historic experimental effort confirmed the last missing piece of the “Standard Model” describing the world of elementary particles and physics, Dr. Bressler is interested in new areas of physics that go beyond the standard model. Her work in developing new technologies and experimental procedures for particle detectors aids scientific research in particle-physics and astrophysics, and has potential interest for non-scientific applications in homeland security, medicine, archeology and more.

Dr. Bressler was honored with the Israel Physical Society’s (IPS) Ze'ev Fraenkel Prize in Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics in 2010. She was awarded a Gutwirth scholarship in 2008 and a Polak Scholarship at the Technion in 2007. She was awarded the Sir Charles Clore Prize for Research in 2016.

Dr. Bressler lives in Moshav Beit Shearim in the Jezreel Valley and has five daughters.

Joseph (Yossi) Cohen served as the Director of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, otherwise known as the Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, from 2016 until 2021. 

Cohen was born to a religious family in Jerusalem. Upon drafting to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Cohen volunteered to the Airborne Nahal Brigade. During his military service, he served as a fighter and commander in the First Lebanon War. In 1983, Cohen joined the Mossad and successfully trained as an intelligence gathering officer. He advanced through the ranks of the Mossad, and was later appointed head of the Mossad's operations in Europe.

In 1997, Cohen completed a B.A. in Social Sciences, summa cum laude, at Bar Ilan University, as part of the University's special program for members of Israel’s defense forces. In 2003, the President of Israel and the Minister of Defense awarded Cohen the prestigious Israel Defense Prize for his leadership and command of a special operation.

In 2006, Cohen was appointed head of the Mossad’s “Tzomet” division, which is responsible for the operation of the agency’s field officers. The division team headed by Cohen won the Israel Defense Prize. In 2011, Cohen was appointed Deputy Director of the Mossad. Prior to his appointment as the Director of the Mossad, in 2013, Cohen was handpicked by then Prime Minister of Israel to serve as Israel’s National Security Advisor and Head of the National Security Council. 

In 2016, Cohen was appointed Director of the Mossad. As Director of the Mossad, Cohen personally orchestrated one of the Mossad's most daring operations for the seizure of the Iranian nuclear archives, the exposure of which was among the main factors behind the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal.  

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Israel, Cohen advocated for the establishment of a National Emergency Command Center, and, together with Mossad representatives and in cooperation with the Defense Ministry, he led the national endeavor to bring vital medical equipment to Israel during the crisis.

In 2020, Cohen led the negotiations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. His unique work with these countries, and the important connections he forged with them, played a significant role in the signing of the groundbreaking Abraham Accords.

In May 2021 Cohen was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Bar Ilan University, in recognition of the many decades in which he dedicated his life to the security of the State of Israel.

In May 2021, William J. Burns, Director of the CIA, presented Cohen with the George J. Tenet Award "in recognition of his steadfast partnership with CIA and unparalleled contributions to joint operations during his five-year tenure as Director of the Mossad".

Cohen and his wife Aya live in Modiin, and are blessed with four children and four grandchildren.

After working in journalism and studying philosophy and history, Prof. Yadin Dudai received a BSc with distinction from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1969, in biochemistry and genetics with supplements in modern history. He earned his PhD in biophysics from the Weizmann Institute in 1974 and joined the faculty the same year. He then went on to postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology, where he was among the pioneers of the field of neurogenetics.

He was Chair of the Board of Studies in the Life Sciences of the Feinberg Graduate School (1983-1988), Head of the Scientists and Fellowships program (1988-1991), Dean of the Faculty of Biology (1991-1997), and Head of the Department of Neurobiology, the Nella and Leon Benoziyo Center for Neurosciences, the Carl and Micaela Einhorn-Dominic Center of Brain Research, and the Norman and Helen Asher Center for Brain Imaging (2004-2010). He is also Scientific Director of the Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE) in the Cognitive Sciences.

Prof. Dudai investigates brain mechanisms of learning and memory. His research, reported so far in over 200 research articles, chapters and books, focuses on how the brain acquires information and transforms it into long-term memory, along with the mechanisms by which memories can be altered with use, and ultimately suppressed or lost. He has identified critical steps in the “life” of both truthful and distorted memories.

Prof. Dudai has been a Visiting Professor at several universities in Europe and the U.S., and, since 2004, is the Albert and Balanche Willner Family Global Distinguished Visiting Professor of Neuroscience at New York University. He was selected as Fellow of the World Economic Forum in Davos (2001), and of the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul (2002, 2003). He was awarded several international lectureships and prizes including the 2013 IPSEN Prize for outstanding achievements in memory research. He has served on several government committees on academic and national issues. In 2014, he was elected a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of EMBO, and in 2016 was appointed as a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

Prof. Yonina Eldar was born in Toronto and made aliyah to Israel in 1979. She received a BSc in physics and a BSc degree in electrical engineering both from Tel-Aviv University in 1995 and 1996, respectively. She completed her PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002. She joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 2002 and was promoted to the rank of professor in 2010. Prof. Eldar is also a Visiting Professor at MIT, a Visiting Scientist at the Broad Institute, an Adjunct Professor at Duke University, and was a visiting professor in Stanford University from 2009 to 2014. She joined the faculty of the Weizmann Institute in March 2019 and became the director of the Manya Igel Centre for Biomedical Engineering and Signal Processing and the first incumbent of the Dorothy and Patrick Gorman Professorial Chair.

Prof. Eldar specializes in developing algorithms for signal processing, and for the representation and transmission of information using advanced mathematical techniques. Her innovations in efficient sampling schemes and signal processing have helped make ultrasound devices smaller, cheaper and able to upload to the cloud; optimized MRI scans for medical imaging, improved data storage and communications, create super-resolution microscopy, and assisted with computational biology.

Among her many professional and scientific honors, Prof. Eldar was a Horev Fellow of the Leaders in Science and Technology program at the Technion and an Alon Fellow (2002-2005). She was awarded the Wolf Foundation Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research (2004), the Henry Taub Prize for Excellence in Research (2007), the Michael Bruno Memorial Award from the Rothschild Foundation (2010), the Weizmann Prize for Exact Sciences (2011), the  IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award (2013), the IEEE/AESS Fred Nathanson Memorial Radar Award (2014), the Hershel Rich Technion Innovation Award (2015), and the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2016). Prof. Eldar was elected to the Israel Committee for Higher Education (2011), as a member of The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2017), and was selected as one of 50 distinguished women scientists in Asia in 2018.

She is the Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing, and an associate editor for several journals in the area of signal and image processing. Prof. Eldar has published hundreds of articles in journals and international conferences, six books, and 20 patents. She serves as a consultant to several hi-tech companies is on the board of directors of two companies. 

Prof. Eldar is married and has five children.

Mr. Harel is the Chair of the Executive Board of the Weizmann Institute of Science since November 2017. He has served on the Board of the Weizmann Institute since 1999, as a member of the International and the Executive Boards.

Mr. Harel was elected Chair of the Israeli Friends Association of the Weizmann Institute in January 2006, and has been active within the framework of the Association and its management for over two decades. He serves as a member of the Board of the Davidson Institute of Science Education, the Weizmann Institute’s educational arm, and on the Board of Mul Nof, the Weizmann Institute’s real estate management company.

Mr. Harel is CEO of America Israel Investments Ltd., a company specializing in real estate investments in Israel and abroad. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of several commercial companies: Chairman of the Board of Directors of Bashan Radiators Ltd., Studio C Ltd, and Mango Ltd. He has been a Director of Jerusalem Economy Ltd. since December 2015. 
Mr. Harel is involved in various social causes. He is a member of the Friends Association of Ilan, the Chairman of the Haifa Sami Ofer Stadium, member of the Board of Directors of Haifa Economic Corporation, member of the Board of Governors of the University of Haifa, and was the Honorary Consul of Sri Lanka in Israel until December 31, 2017.

Mr. Harel holds a Bachelor’s degree in economics, and a Master’s degree in business administration. He and his wife Orna reside in Tel Aviv.

A Rehovot native, Prof. Leeor Kronik earned a BSc and a PhD in electrical and electronic engineering from Tel Aviv University in 1991 and 1996, respectively. For the next several years he worked as both a Research Associate in the Department of Physical Electronics at Tel Aviv University, and as a consultant in the Department of Materials and Interfaces at the Weizmann Institute. In 1999, he began postdoctoral studies at the University of Minnesota. He returned to the Weizmann Institute in 2002 and rejoined the staff of the Department of Materials and Interfaces. He served as Head of that department from 2012 to 2021. He now serves as the Director of the Tom and Mary Beck Center for Advanced and Intelligent Materials (C-AIM). Prof. Kronik is the incumbent of the Aryeh and Mintzi Katzman Professorial Chair. 

Prof. Kronik’s research focuses on the theoretical understanding of the basic microscopic properties of materials, including mechanical, electrical, optical, and magnetic—in terms of their composition and structure. To predict these new properties, he uses “first principles calculations,” where material properties are predicted from the atomic number and mass of the atomic species involved, based on the laws of quantum physics. 

Prof. Kronik was selected to be an inaugural class member of the new "Young Israel Academy” (2012). He was elected as an American Physical Society Fellow (2013), was awarded the Helen and Martin Kimmel Award for Innovative Investigation (2021), the Award Excellence in Research Award of the Israel Vacuum Society (2018), the Israel Chemical Society Prize for Outstanding Young Scientist (2011), and the Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research from the Wolf Foundation (2006).

Prof. Kronik is married and has two children.  He is a member of the Israel Association of Baseball and enjoys practicing Shotokan Karate, nature hikes, and Middle Eastern music.

Prof. Ron Milo was born in Israel. He studied physics and mathematics, earning a BSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and continued on to an MSc in electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University. He then studied biological physics, earning his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science under the guidance of Prof. Uri Alon. He was the first fellow in the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School. He then joined the Department of Plant Sciences at the Weizmann Institute.

Prof. Milo brings the tools of systems biology to bear on the challenges of sustainability. His research aims to understand the cellular highways of energy and carbon transformations in quantitative terms. To this end, he and his team employ a combination of computational and experimental synthetic biology tools to bear on carbon fixation, the biochemical process in which carbon dioxide (CO2) creates organic compounds. He is working to reveal the fundamental design principles of carbon fixation and photosynthesis, with the goal of improving the efficiency of food and fuel production. In addition, Prof. Milo brings the tools of big data analysis and systems biology to work on understanding the biosphere and human impacts on the living world, including, for example, the ecological costs of food production.

Prof. Milo was recognized by Thomson Reuters for authoring one of the most highly cited paper among all scientific papers in the first decade of the 21st century. He has received a number of academic and scientific awards, including a GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists, the John F. Kennedy Prize awarded by the Institute to PhD graduates, the Esther Hellinger Memorial Prize, and the D.N. Chorafas International PhD Award. He served as Head of the Israel Young Academy of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and is currently serving as the Chair of the Israeli Ministry of Education Steering Committee for Science and Technology Education.

Prof. Ron Milo heads the Mary and Tom Beck-Canadian Center for Alternative Energy Research. He is the incumbent of the Charles and Louise Gartner Professorial Chair.

Prof. Milo enjoys playing the harmonica and hiking with his wife, Hilla, and their two daughters.

Prof. Eran Ofek completed his BSc (1997) and MSc (2000)  degrees magna cum laude in physics at Tel Aviv University;  and his PhD , from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, in 2005. He went on to conduct postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Prof. Ofek joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2011.

In recent years, his team measured, for the first time, a peculiar property of stars before they explode as supernovae. Many of these stars exhibit outbursts in the period preceding the explosion and release a large amount of mass in the process. These processes have important implications for our understanding of the latest stages of stellar evolution and stellar death. Prof. Ofek and his team develop cutting-edge algorithms that have a large impact on the way discoveries are made. These algorithms stem from astrophysical problems, but they have implications for other fields as well, including medicine.

The Ofek lab has constructed a new wide field-of-view telescope that is observing large patches of the sky at very high frame rates (25 times per second). These telescopes are designed to search for an as-yet unobserved Oort Cloud, a shell of of ice and rocky small bodies that orbits the sun at the furthest reaches of the solar system. In addition, Prof. Ofek is participating in the development  the space mission ULTRASAT, and he is leading the development of a novel cost-effective astronomical survey telescope.

Prof. Ofek’s many academic and professional awards include the Weizmann Institute’s Morris L. Levinson Prize in Physics (2016), the Wolf Foundation’s Krill Prize for Scientific Excellence (2015), an Israel Physical Society (IPS) Prize for the Young Researcher (2014), an Einstein Fellowship, and the Israel Physical Society Prize in 2004.

Prof. Roee Ozeri is the Vice President for Development and Communications.

Prof. Roee Ozeri was born in Israel. He earned a BSc in physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his MSc and PhD in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He conducted postdoctoral research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,  Colorado in the group of David Wineland, a 2012 Nobel Laureate in Physics, after which Prof. Ozeri joined the Weizmann Institute faculty.

Prof. Ozeri's lab works with ultra-cold atoms. One of his research directions may advance the fields of quantum computing – the development of computing systems based on the principles of quantum mechanics. Such quantum systems would have the potential to perform immense information-processing tasks that are out of the reach of regular computers, as well as a vastly greater capacity for storing information. If such systems are indeed built, they will revolutionize the world of computing, which will require an entirely new approach to ensuring the security of information, for example, in online banking transactions. Prof. Ozeri focuses on one of the greatest challenges in developing quantum computers: finding ways to mitigate the effect of noise on quantum systems. Quantum information is easily disrupted by the slightest environmental interference, and researchers have not yet figured out how to avert this on a large scale.

Prof. Ozeri received the Rosa and Emilio Segre Research Award, the Morris L. Levinson Prize in Physics, and the prestigious Rothschild Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Prof. Ozeri is a member of the executive boards of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and the Schwartz/Reisman Science Education Center.

Prof. Ozeri is married and a father to three children. His hobbies include sea-kayaking,
running, cooking, reading and writing short stories.

Born in 1970 in Israel, Prof. Gilad Perez received a BSc in physics from Bar-Ilan University (1996), and earned his MSc (1999) and PhD (2003) degrees in theoretical high-energy physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the faculty of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University in 2006, held visiting professorships at Boston University and Harvard University during 2007, and joined the Weizmann Institute in 2008. From 2011-2014, he also served as a Staff Member of the CERN theory division. He became Dean of the Feinberg Graduate School in December of 2019.

As a theoretical physicist, Prof. Gilad Perez works on a wide variety of topics in particle physics, cosmology and the precision frontier of quantum sensors, searching for new fundamental interactions and dark matter. He has developed theoretical ideas to help understand physics beyond the Standard Model of fundamental forces and particles. 

Prof. Perez has recently joined forces with Prof. Roee Ozeri of the Department of Physics of Complex Systems and colleagues from Germany in a unique collaboration in which they are showing that by combining particle physics with precision laser spectroscopy, they are able to probe new types of fundamental interactions. Even more recently, with collaborators from Germany and the US, Prof. Perez has developed new theoretical ideas and experimental concepts to search for ultra-light dark matter through the most precise measurements ever done on Earth by looking at time-variation of the fundamental constants of nature. 

Prof. Perez received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (2020), the Rosa and Emilio Segre Research Award (2019), the Israel Science Foundation’s Friedenberg prize (2018), an Israel Physical Society (IPS) prize for young scientists (2011), the Peter and Patricia Gruber Award (2009), an independent grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (2007), and a Clore Fellowship (2000). 

He is married and has a daughter.

Prof. Carol Prives is the DaCosta Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She was educated in Canada, receiving her BSc and PhD from McGill University. Her postdoctoral training took place at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Weizmann Institute under the mentorship of Professor Michel Revel, after which she became a faculty member at the Weizmann Institute. She then joined the Biological Sciences Department at Columbia University where she was named the DaCosta Professor of Biology in 1995. Prof. Prives served as Chair of that department between 2000 and 2004. She has served as the Co-Chair of the Weizmann Institute's Scientific and Academic Advisory Committee since November 2017.

Since the late 1980’s her work has focused on the p53 tumor suppressor protein, the product of the most frequently mutated gene in human cancers. She and her group have elucidated aspects of the structure and function of the p53 protein especially as it relates to its roles as a transcriptional activator. In parallel, her group has examined how cancer related mutant forms of p53 regulate tumorigenesis. Work from her laboratory has also illuminated the functions of the key p53 negative regulators, Mdm2 and MdmX.

Prof. Prives has served as Chair of both the Experimental Virology and the Cell and Molecular Pathology Study Sections of the NIH and was a member of the NCI Intramural Scientific Advisory Board. She was also a member of the Advisory Boards of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Massachusetts General Cancer Center as well as the American Association for Cancer Research and is currently a member of the Scientific Council of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. She also serves on the editorial boards of Cell, Genes & Development, Cancer Discovery and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Prof. Prives has received several honors including being named an American Cancer Society Research Professor, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences and the AACR Academy.  She has presented numerous named lectures and has received awards including the NCI Rosalind E Franklin Award for Women in Science, the Paul Jansen Prize in Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, and the AACR-Women in Cancer Research Charlotte Friend Memorial Lectureship Award. Prof. Prives has also received an honorary doctorate from McGill University, her alma mater.

Prof. Ziv Reich is the Vice President of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He was born in Israel. He received his BSc from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1988. He studied polyelectrolyte condensation, earning his MSc and PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Following postdoctoral research at Stanford University, he joined the Institute in 1998.

Prof. Reich's studies include the transport of molecules and macromolecules between the cell nucleus and cytoplasm, protein folding and binding, structure, function and adaptation of photosynthetic membranes, and the molecular basis of chloroplast development and leaf senescence – processes of major significance for agriculture. He is also elucidating the mechanisms that allow plants to withstand harsh environmental conditions, primarily water deficiency, with an eye toward developing drought-resistant crops.

His research group also investigates the origin and evolution of diversity in microbial populations, asking questions related to their diversity over time, how the environmental history of the community affects the breadth of possible individual traits, and when a transient change in an individual become a permanent trait in the population. He addresses these questions using directed-evolution experiments and data analysis based on deep learning and mathematical modeling. His research on the evolution of diversity, in addition to providing insight into key scientific questions, may shed light on medical topics related to cellular heterogeneity such as bacterial resistance to antibiotics and cancer resistance to chemotherapy, and may inform the management of biodiversity in the face of environmental changes.

Prof. Reich received the Sir Charles Clore Prize, the Gerhard Schmidt Prize in Chemistry, the Rothschild Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Yigal Allon Fellowship, the Teva Pharmaceuticals Award and the Morris L. Levinson Prize in Biology. He was also elected an EMBO Young Investigator.

Prof. Reich heads the Lorry I. Lokey Research School of Biochemical Science, and the EKARD Research School of Biological Science. He is the incumbent of the Hella and Derrick Kleeman Professorial Chair of Biochemistry.

Prof. Reich is married and the father of three.

Born in Jerusalem, Prof. Elad Schneidman studied in the “Amirim” honors program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received a BSc in physics and computer science in 1990. After serving as a research and development officer in the IDF, he worked as a researcher at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center in Israel. He received a PhD in computational neuroscience from the Hebrew University in 2001. After five years of postdoctoral research at Princeton University, Prof. Schneidman returned to Israel in 2006 and joined the Weizmann Institute, where he is the incumbent of the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Professorial Chair. 

Prof. Schneidman studies the design and function of networks of neurons, networks of brains, and other biological and artificial networks – asking how they represent and process information, develop, learn, and make decisions. Exploring questions at the intersection of biology, physics, computation, and learning, his groups mixes and designs tools and ideas from machine learning, statistical physics, information theory, network theory, and applied math. 

Combining theoretical work, modeling, analysis of experimental data, and behavioral experiments, Prof. Schneidman studies how information is encoded by large groups of neurons in the brain and how this encoded information might be read. His work has given detailed dictionaries for the "neural code" of large neural populations at an unprecedented scale and resolution, and identified design principles that shape these neural codes. He is particualry interested in the architecture of neural circuits (or "connectomes") and the emerging function – both in biological neural networks and artificial ones. He also studies collective behavior in animal groups (fish, birds, mice, monkeys, and humans) and artificial agents, focusing on individual and group learning. These works not only characterize the individuality of learning dynamics and its manifistation at the neuronal level, but also show how to tailor personalized teaching to optimize a learner's performance.

Prof. Schneidman is the recipient of a Horowitz Foundation/Center for Complexity Science Junior Faculty Fellowship (2006) and the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation Award (2007). He was part of the resident faculty of the Marine Biological Laboratory's summer course on computational neuroscience for many years. He is part of the Simons Foundation collaboration on the Global Brain and was a visiting professor at NYU and the Swartz Visiting Professor at the University of Washington. 

Prof. Schneidman is married to Dr. Hadas Mechoulam, a retina surgeon and pediatric ophthalmologist; they have three children. Outside the lab, he enjoys listening to music, reading, playing tennis, and hiking with his family.

Born in Tel Aviv, Prof. Eran Segal received a BSc in computer science summa cum laude from Tel Aviv University (1998), and a PhD in computer science and genetics from Stanford University (2004). Before joining the Weizmann Institute in 2005, he held an independent research position at the Rockefeller University in New York. 

Prof. Segal heads a multi-disciplinary team of computational biologists and experimental scientists in the fields of computational and systems biology. His team has extensive experience in machine learning, computational biology, probabilistic models, and analysis of heterogeneous high-throughput genomic data. His research focuses on the microbiome, nutrition, and genetics, and their effect on health and disease. His aim is develop personalized medicine based on big data from human cohorts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Prof. Segal developed models for analyzing the dynamics of the pandemic and served as an advisor to the Government of Israel.

Prof. Segal has received several awards and honors for his work, among them the Michael Bruno Memorial Award in Computational Biology (2015), the Morris L. Levinson Prize in Biology (2009), the EMBO Young Investigator Award, and the Overton Prize (2007) —awarded annually by the International Society for Bioinformatics (ICSB) to one scientist for outstanding accomplishments in the field of computational biology. He was selected as a member of the Young Israeli Academy of Science and the European Molecular Biology Organization (2015). He has published over 170 publications and two of his papers ranked among the top ten in the all-time rankings of the Faculty of 1000 website in January 2013.

Dror Shouval, MD MMSc, is the Director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Center at the Institute of Gastroenterology, Nutrition and Liver Disease at Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel. He obtained his MD with honors from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in 2006. After he completed a pediatric residency at Schneider Children’s Medical Center in 2010, he obtained advanced training in pediatric gastroenterology at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he conducted basic and translational research in Prof. Scott Snapper’s lab on intestinal inflammation in very young children. While in Boston, Dr. Shouval also earned a Master’s degree in clinical and translational investigation from Harvard Medical School.

In 2015, Dr. Shouval returned to Israel and joined the Pediatric Gastroenterology Unit at Sheba Medical Center as a staff physician. He also opened an independent research lab, affiliated with the Sackler Faculty of Medicine of Tel Aviv University. In 2020, he moved to Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel to serve as the Director of the IBD Center, and his lab moved with him to Felsenstein Medical Research Center, located across from Schneider Children’s Medical Center.   

Dr. Shouval investigates the causes of IBD in children, focusing on genetics, immunology, and environmental factors. His lab works side-by-side with the clinic, ensuring clear relevance to patient care. As such, his previous findings facilitated administration of novel therapeutic interventions to patients with unique IBD symptoms. Currently, his lab is trying to identify mechanisms of propagation and healing of inflammation, in order to develop novel biomarkers reflecting disease course over time, and new therapies for patients who often fail to respond to various medications.

Dr. Shouval is married to Dr. Ruth Scherz-Shouval, who leads a lab in the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Biomolecular Sciences.

Born in Petach Tikva, Israel, Prof. Eli Waxman earned a BSc in mathematics and physics (1986), and an MSc in physics (1989), both summa cum laude, and a PhD degree in physics (1994) all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As he studied toward his graduate degrees, he also worked as a Research Physicist in Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center. From 1994-1998, he served as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, New Jersey). In 1998, he joined the staff of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He served as the head of the Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics (2009-2012) and as Chief Scientist of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission while on leave from the Weizmann Institute (2013-2015). Today he serves as the Director of the Benoziyo Center for Astrophysics and of the Schwartz/Reisman Institute for Theoretical Physics, as well as Chairman of the Board of the Pazy Research Foundation. He is the incumbent of the Max Planck Professorial Chair of Quantum Physics.

The research interests of Prof. Waxman are neutrino, high-energy, and relativistic- astrophysics. With U.S. colleagues, he proposed a theory for the origin of the highest energy particles known in the Universe (a hundred million times more energetic than the particles produced in the LHC at CERN). To test this theory, a large, giga-ton, neutrino detector has been constructed and is being operated at the South Pole. Its results provide initial support to the theory. He has initiated and is leading a scientific satellite mission, ULTRASAT, which will help us answer some of the big questions in astrophysics, including how supermassive black holes rule their neighborhoods, how stars explode, and where the heavy elements in the Universe –from iron to gold, and beyond –are produced. ULTRASAT will put Israel – and Israeli scientists and engineers – at the forefront of a global movement to explore the Universe with small, affordable satellites.

Prof. Waxman is married to Vered, a social worker and psychotherapist, and is father to Chen and Iddo.