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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
129 West 29th Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10001, USA