Six Israelis win $10,000 Krill Prizes for excellence

All six are untenured university scientists under the age of 50.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
hebrew university 224.88 (photo credit: Hebrew University )
hebrew university 224.88
(photo credit: Hebrew University )
Six Israeli scientists - all under the age of 50 - received the Wolf Foundation's third annual Krill Prizes for excellence on Wednesday, worth $10,000 each. They are awarded in exact sciences, life sciences, medicine, agriculture and engineering. The ceremony took place at Tel Aviv University. The winners are:
  • Dr. Amir Orian of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology's faculty of medicine. His research interests include the function and regulation of genetic networks in developmental biology and in cancer.
  • Dr. Tal Alexander of the Weizmann Institute of Science physics faculty. His research interests include massive black holes, in particular the one in our galaxy; and stellardynamics, interactions and processes near a massive black hole, including gravitational lensing and gravitational waves.
  • Dr. Zeev Zalevsky of Bar-Ilan University's engineering school. He specializes in free space optical systems and methods for enhanced imaging and sensing, electro-optical in-fiber and waveguide-based devices for data sensing, processing and RF-photonics.
  • Dr. Oren Froy of the Hebrew University's faculty of agriculture, food and environmental quality sciences. He is most interested in biological clock control over metabolism, the innate immune system, metabolic disorders and aging.
  • Dr. Yoav Tsori of Ben-Gurion University's department of chemical engineering. He studies the theoretical description of ways to control structures at the sub-micron scale, especially how external fields induce new types of phase-transitions in liquids, polymers and other ordered phases of soft-matter.
  • Dr. Roded Sharan, TAU's school of computer science. His interests are systems biology with a focus on comparative analysis of protein networks, computational genomics and graph algorithms. The prizes are awarded to faculty members at Israeli institutions of higher education who hold the untenured positions of lecturer or senior lecturer.