Creating a US-Israel Cycle of Academic Excellence Speakers

Professor Henis has held visiting scholar positions at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at Berkeley, CA, at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC and has won many other prizes and fellowships. Professor Henis has served on many university committees and is active in scientific organizations in Israel and the USA. Professor Henis is a leader in the Cancer Biophysics field. His studies combine cell biology with membrane biophysics to elucidate, in live cells, the action mechanisms of cancer-related proteins. As Vice President for Research and Development at Tel Aviv University, Professor Henis is in charge of advancing the research and development activities in the university, and of making the information accumulated at the university available to the scientific community. In addition, Professor Henis works hard to pave the way for new research opportunities.

His work includes five books, most recently The Hunt for Vulcan, Newton and the Counterfeiter, and Einstein in Berlin, and about a dozen science documentaries. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and has won the AAAS and National Academy of Sciences awards, and shared a Peabody Award. In his day job, he’s a professor of science writing at MIT. He lives in the Boston area with his wife, son and a semi-feral cat.

Much of Dr. Lindenfeld’s research focuses on environmental communication, especially in the area of sustainability. With a keen interest in food culture, she has dedicated significant effort to investigating the relationship of food and media and to understanding how we can advance more sustainable food systems in the U.S. She and her co-author, Fabio Parasecoli, associate professor and director of Food Studies Initiatives at the New School of Social Research, look forward to the release of their book with Columbia University Press, “Feasting Our Eyes: Food Films, and Cultural Identity in the United States.”

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 also founded Corephotonics, where he serves as the CEO. Recently he founded Unispectral, which is a spin-off of Tel Aviv University. From January 2008 until December 2010, Professor Mendlovic was the Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Science. He also served for 6 years as the Co-Chair of the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development. At present he serves as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University. He also co-ordinates the new Tel Aviv University Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, is the Chairman of StarTAU, and the Founder of TAU Ventures.

Moti’s interests are mainly in nonlinear optics, photonics, solitons, sub-wavelength imaging, lasers, quantum simulators and quantum electronics, although he finds entertainment in more demanding fields such as basketball and hiking. He has won numerous international and national awards. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. In 2014 Moti Segev won the Israel Prize in Physics, the highest honor for an Israeli scientist. He takes pride in the success of his graduate students and postdocs. Currently, 19 of them are professors in the USA, Germany, Taiwan, Croatia, Italy, India and Israel. Many of his students hold senior R&D positions in industry.

Vardi has served as Director General of the Israel Ministry of Development and of the Ministry of Energy. He was Chairman of the Israel National Oil Company, and of Israel Chemicals. Vardi participated in the peace talks with Egypt, the Palestinians, Jordan and Syria. Vardi serves on many boards, including the Jerusalem Foundation, the Technion, the Weizmann Institute, Hebrew University, and the Open University. He has served as advisor to companies around the world, and is a member of the World Economic Forum, and Co-Chairman of the EU-Israel Business Dialogue. He has received the Israeli Prime Minister’s Hi-Tech Award for Life Achievement twice and has been named Best Internet Personality by TechCrunch Europe, Entrepreneur of the Year by Tel Aviv University, and one of Europe’s 25 top techs by The Wall Street Journal.

Professor Yovel’s research focuses on the neural and cognitive mechanisms of person recognition. She uses a comprehensive approach to study the roles of the face, body voice and motion in person recognition, using neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI and EEG as well as behavioral measures and eye tracking. Her recent findings go beyond the study of perceptual information in face recognition and highlight the roles of conceptual information and multi- modal dynamic information in person recognition. She recently received the Bruno Award from the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies. The award is presented each year to Israeli scholars and scientists who display exceptional promise, and whose achievements to date suggest future breakthroughs in their respective fields.