Israel Academy of Sciences gains four new members

Prof. Shimon Ullman, Prof. Reshef Tenne, Prof. Avishai Margalit and Prof. Moti Segev to join 95 current members.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
from (L) MARGALIT, SEGEV, ULLMAN, TENNE_311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
from (L) MARGALIT, SEGEV, ULLMAN, TENNE_311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Four eminent scientists will become members of the Israel Academy of Sciences – the official advisory body on the sciences to the government – on Tuesday evening.
Prof. Shimon Ullman, Prof. Reshef Tenne, Prof. Avishai Margalit and Prof. Moti Segev will join the 95 current members of the academy, which is responsible for promoting science projects of national significance.
The four new members are all senior researchers from universities and were elected at the academy’s general assembly. All those in the academy are experts in the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities and have tenure for life.
Ullman, who was born in Jerusalem in the year of the founding of the state, graduated from the Hebrew University in mathematics and physics after serving as a fighter pilot in the Israel Air Force. Later, he also completed a degree in biology and his doctorate in artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1986, he was named a professor at both the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and at MIT.
Tenne was born in 1944 to Eastern European immigrants and raised on a kibbutz. After military service, he studied chemistry at the Hebrew University and went on to earn a master’s degree in physical chemistry, followed by a doctorate in statistical mechanics.
After he did his post-doctoral work in the Battelle Institute in Geneva, he joined Weizmann and researched photoelectrochemical cells.
In 1992, Tenne and his colleagues discovered new forms of materials composed from a relatively small number of carbon atoms structured like cages, leading to applications as advanced lubricants that in recent years have been used by industry.
Margalit, born in 1939 in the Jezreel Valley, was raised and lived all his life in Jerusalem. After his service in the IDF, he went to the Hebrew University to study philosophy and economics.
His doctorate was on the cognitive status of metaphors and afterward he joined the HU philosophy department, where he continued to work and research in the field of the philosophy of language.
A recipient of the Israel Prize in philosophy and the EMET Prize, he is also an honorary associate at Queens College at Oxford University.
Segev was born in 1958 in Romania, came on aliya with his family three years later and settled in Haifa. He earned an electrical engineering degree from the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology and after three years of post-doctoral study at the California Institute of Technology was the first Israeli ever appointed professor at Princeton University. He returned to Israel in 1998, when he became a distinguished professor at the Technion.
Segev conducts research on non-linear optics, the physics of lasers and imaging and developed many new fields in these scientific spheres, publishing 270 articles in journals. He also received many awards including the Quantum Electronics Prize, a major European award in this field, and the Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America.