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Selection Committee

The Selection Committee recommends program candidates who will be confirmed by the Steering Committee. Selection Committee members also advise the Steering Committee on all scientific matters.

Candidates for the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program are assessed based on their academic and research achievements, as well as on personal merit and leadership qualities, without regard to race, religion, gender, ethnicity, or age.

Naama Brenner

Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

Technion

Naama Brenner is a Professor at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering at Technion, and member of the Network Biology Research Lab. She holds the Julius M. and Bernice Naiman Chair in Engineering. Her research field is theoretical cell and population biophysics.

Naama Brenner graduated Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science from the Hebrew University, and received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Technion. She was postdoctoral fellow at NEC Research Institute in Princeton, where she worked in Computational Neuroscience with special interest in sensory adaptation and multiple timescales in neural coding. Upon returning to Israel she joined the group of scientists and engineers who founded Insightec Ltd., to develop a focused-ultrasound system for noninvasive tumor ablation under thermal imaging. She later joined Chemical Engineering at Technion to establish a theoretical biophysics research group, and initiated with fellow Technion scholars the Network Biology Research Lab. Current research in her group includes exploratory learning in biological cells, phenotypic variability and interactions in microbial populations, regulation of cellular growth and division, and homeostasis in biological systems.

Mona Maroun

Rector

University of Haifa

Professor Mouna Maroun is Rector of the University of Haifa, where she has been a faculty member for over 20 years. During that time, she has served as Vice President and Dean of Research and Development, and Chair of the Neurobiology Department.

Prof. Maroun was Chair of the National Steering Committee on Enhancing Access to Higher Education for the Arab Society in Israel, and served as a member of the National Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Israeli Council for Higher Education.  A neurobiologist, she holds a PhD in psychobiology from the University of Haifa. She did postdoctoral research at the University of Paris — XI in Orsay, France.

Chaim Hames

Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

Ben-Gurion University

Prof. Chaim Hames is Rector of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of General History.

Prof. Chaim Hames is Rector of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of General History. Hames received his PhD in Medieval History from Cambridge University, and focuses on the inter-religious encounters of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, mysticism, philosophy, apocalypticism, polemics and conversion. He established the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at BGU to analyze the numerous factors involved in the conversion process. The author of over 40 scholarly articles and books on medieval Jewish history, as well as a book on Judaism in contemporary Israel, Hames is an elected member of the European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences.

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Albert Pinhasov

Rector

Ariel University

Albert Pinhasov is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson School of Medicine, with a research focus in Molecular Psychiatry and Psychopharmacology.

He was awarded a Master of Science degree (MSc) in 1998 and a PhD in Molecular Biology and Clinical Biochemistry in 2002 at Tel Aviv University. Between 2002-2004, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development. He joined the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University in 2005. Prof. Pinhasov is the Head of the Laboratory of Behavioral and Molecular Psychiatry in the Department of Molecular Biology. His research focuses on the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of mental disorders and the relationship between the development of psychiatric deviations and stress sensitivity. His group demonstrated that inherited susceptibility to stress is linked to gradual development of chronic inflammation, metabolic alterations, brain neurotransmission deterioration, electrical activity accompanied by behavioral disturbances in emotional and cognitive domains, and reduced life expectancy. In October 2020, Prof. Pinhasov was elected as the Rector of Ariel University. Previously, he served as Vice President and Dean for Research & Development and the Head of the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University.

Ziv Reich

Vice President

Weizmann Institute

Prof. Reich joined the Weizmann Institute in 1998 following postdoctoral research at Stanford University. He received a BSc from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and earned his MSc and PhD degrees from the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute.
 
Prof. Reich’s studies numerous processes of major significance for agriculture and elucidates the mechanisms which allow plants to withstand harsh environmental conditions, primarily water deficiency, towards developing drought-resistant crops. His lab also investigates the origin and evolution of diversity in microbial populations, using directed-evolution experiments and data analysis based on deep learning and mathematical modeling. His research on the evolution of diversity 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 is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Morris L. Levinson Prize in Biology and Teva Pharmaceuticals Award.
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Yaron Shav-Tal

Vice President for Research

Bar-Ilan University

Professor Yaron Shav-Tal is Vice President for Research at Bar-Ilan University, where he is a full professor in the Mina & Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, and at the Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA). Previously, he served as Dean of Bar-Ilan’s Faculty of Life Sciences.

Prof. Shav-Tal’s research group focuses on dissecting the kinetics of the gene expression pathway in single living cells using fluorescence live-cell microscopy and tagging of DNA and mRNA molecules. In addition to addressing biological questions, they have devised new technical approaches for studying genes at the single-gene level, and performing single-molecule analysis. They have tested new types of fluorescent probes that bind RNAs, which make it easier to detect RNA in patient cells, tissues and biopsies.

Prof. Shav-Tal received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and did postdoctoral research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He has published over 100 articles and won numerous awards, including prestigious research grants from the European Research Council and the National Institutes of Health.

Professor Yaron Shav-Tal is Vice President for Research at Bar-Ilan University, where he is a full professor in the Mina & Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, and at the Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA). Previously, he served as Dean of Bar-Ilan’s Faculty of Life Sciences.

Prof. Shav-Tal’s research group focuses on dissecting the kinetics of the gene expression pathway in single living cells using fluorescence live-cell microscopy and tagging of DNA and mRNA molecules. In addition to addressing biological questions, they have devised new technical approaches for studying genes at the single-gene level, and performing single-molecule analysis. They have tested new types of fluorescent probes that bind RNAs, which make it easier to detect RNA in patient cells, tissues and biopsies. 

Prof. Shav-Tal received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and did postdoctoral research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He has published over 100 articles and won numerous awards, including prestigious research grants from the European Research Council and the National Institutes of Health.

Tamir Sheafer

Rector

The Hebrew University

Prof. Tamir Sheafer, the Rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, researches comparative and digital political communication in the political science and communication departments. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University between 2016-2022. He completed a bachelor’s degree in communication at the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate in political communication at the Hebrew University.
 
Prof. Sheafer research projects include, among other things, the role of the charismatic skills of politicians in the political media arena and beyond. His research also shows how politicians in Israel and other countries are becoming increasingly central and significant in politics, at the expense of political institutions, such as parties and governments. Prof. Sheafer was a member of several international research groups of political communication scholars, which include researchers from nearly twenty countries, and in this framework he studied in the last two decades how factors such as the structure of the political system and the strength of democracy affect political and communication processes. At the Hebrew University, he leads a research laboratory of digital political communication (DeepStory), which focuses on developing new methods for computerized textual analysis of political narratives while being based on deep learning models. Prof. Tamir Sheafer serves as Rector from the beginning of the 2022/2023 academic year.

Mark Shtaif

Rector

Tel Aviv University

Prof. Mark Shtaif was appointed rector of Tel Aviv University in September 2020. He joined the Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University in 2002 and served as head of the School of Electrical Engineering from 2017 to 2020.
 
Prof. Shtaif is a communications scientist who works in the field of fiber optics and optical communication systems, integrating optics, quantum theory, nonlinear systems, communications theory, information theory, and signal processing. Over the years, he has made contributions in the areas of optical amplification, analysis of nonlinear propagation, polarization-related phenomena, analysis of noise and signal detection, quantum information in fiber systems, and fundamental limits to optical communications. In his most notable and most recent work, he contributed to the analysis of polarization-dependent loss in fiber communications; the nonlinear-noise model in fiber-optic transmission; the theory of space-division multiplexed communications; and to effective phase reconstruction by means of the Kramers-Kronig receiver. Prof. Shtaif is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional organization.