Selection Committees

Prof. Shulamit Michaeli is Vice President for Research at Bar-Ilan University, where she previously served as Dean of the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, and founding Director of the Nano-Medicine Center at the Bar-Ilan Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA). A microbiologist by training, Prof. Michaeli has pioneered the use of nanotechnology in fighting diseases, creating nano-drugs for parasitic infections and cancer. She holds patents to a number of important technologies and has directed the Life Sciences and Medicine Division of the Israel Science Foundation. Prof. Michaeli served as a member of the selection committees for the Israel Prize and the EMET Prize and was named “one of Israel’s 40 leading women” on two separate occasions by Globes newspaper.

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.

Gustavo Mesch is a Professor of Sociology. He completed his BA and MA at the University of Haifa, and his PhD at Ohio State University. His research has focused on the social effects of Internet and mobile communication, social networks online and offline and technology and social capital. Professor Mesch has been a visiting Fellow at the University of Toronto and the Oxford University Internet Institute. He is active in the American Sociological Association and the Israeli Internet Society. He was Editor-in-Chief of Sociological Focus. Before serving as Rector at the University of Haifa, he was Dean of its Paul & Herta Amir Faculty of Social Sciences.

Barak Medina is a Professor of Law. He holds the Justice Haim H. Cohn Chair in Human Rights Law. He has a PhD in Economics from the Hebrew University, an LL.B from Tel Aviv University, and an LL.M from Harvard. Professor Medina has served as Dean of the Law Faculty (2009-2012). He was also the academic director of the Hebrew University’s Center for the Study of End-of-Life, the Research Center on Multi-Culturalism and Diversity, and the Program in Transitional Justice. He was a visiting professor at University of California, Berkley; Columbia University Law School; and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy. He also serves on the European Commission for Democracy through Law, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters.

Shimon Marom (MD, PhD) is a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics. He holds the Pearl Seiden Academic Chair of Sciences. His research focuses on bio-electrical phenomena in proteins, cells and networks. Professor Marom has headed the Physiology & Biophysics department and the Rothschild Scholars Technion Program for Excellence. Dr. Marom has also served as Dean of Medicine at the Technion.

Yaron Oz is Professor of Physics at Tel Aviv University. He has been a Research Fellow at UC Berkeley and a Staff Member at CERN. He served as head of the School of Physics, Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences and is currently the Rector of the university. His fields of research include quantum field theories, gravity and superstrings. Oz has been the president of the Israel Physics Society; he is the scientific director of the Journal of High Energy Physics and a scientific editor of the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. He is head of the National Committee of Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences and a scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.

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.