Prof. Peretz Lavie, president of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology,
will go on to a second term following an overwhelming vote of 92:2 in the
institute’s senate.
The Technion’s executive committee then approved his
second four-year term unanimously. The executive council will formally approve
it in June.
During his first term, Lavie – a psychologist and sleep
medicine expert who was previously dean of the school’s Rappaport Faculty of
Medicine – put an emphasis on bringing in new faculty members and raising more
funds for their salaries and the supplies they would need to teach and conduct
research. Since he became president in 2009, the Technion has added 130 new
faculty members, for a current total of 564. In addition, research grants
tripled during his term, from $7 million in 2008 to $21m. in 2012.
Lavie
also negotiated the establishment of a joint engineering campus with Cornell
University in New York. Cornell and the Technion successfully vied against 40
American and foreign institutions to build the campus with a grant of land on
Roosevelt Island and $100m. for infrastructure improvements.