Technion’s 2013 Board of Governors Meeting has Come to a Close

The 2013 annual Board of Governors (BOG) Meeting of the Technion has come to a close. The events began on Saturday night at the President’s Reception in honor of the BOG hosted by Professor Peretz Lavie and his wife Lina at the “Bikta Bayaar” event hall located in Beit Oren, a kibbutz in the Carmel Mountain. Guests included senior Israeli economic and industry leaders including Microsoft Israel CEO Danny Yamin, who is the Chairman of the Technion Council, as well as high-tech entrepreneur and Technion graduate Yossi Vardi.

On Monday morning, there was a special Nobel Laureate Tree Planting Ceremony that invited Professors Danny Shechtman and Alvin Roth to plant trees along the Nobel Prize Laureates Avenue in the Lorry Lokey garden at the Technion. Professor Schechtman from the Technion’s Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011 for his discovery of quasicrystals, and Professor Roth received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.

“I was five years old when I planted my first tree,” said Professor Schechtman . “It was in the Bar Ilan Garden in Ramat Itzhak. The tree is still there. Since then, planting trees always accompanies me with a sense of creativity and joy of making our country greener.”

Professor Roth said that although he didn’t physically plant a tree in his childhood, he remembers donating to the Jewish National Fund -JNF (in Hebrew “Keren Kayemet”) for a tree to be planted in his name in Israel. “Since then, I’ve been searching for this tree on my visits to Israel,” he said. Technion President Professor Peretz Lavie, responded by saying that from now on he will always be able to find his tree here at the Technion, along the Nobel Prize Laureates Avenue.

On Monday evening, the Honorary Doctorate Conferment Ceremony took place at the Churchill Auditorium. The recipients of honorary doctorates were Professor Alvin Roth, for his important contributions to the field of game theory and experimental economics and their application to the design of new economic institutions, Ilan Biran, former Chairman of RAFAEL Armament Development Authority Ltd., Elisha Yanay, former President and General Manager of Motorola Israel and founder of his own company that deals with high-technology, communications and homeland security, Steven Emerson, who has generously supported Birthright Israel and is actively involved with “Stand With Us” (STU) – providing training and support to 40 pro-Israel North American college leaders in their efforts to educate fellow students about Israel and to dispel anti-Israel slurs, Yoram Alster, Alfred Bär, Melvyn Bloom, Daniel Rose, and Professor Jason Speyer.