Professor Ehud Keinan: Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, holding the Benno Gitter & Ilana Ben-Ami Chair of Biotechnology, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and the Skaggs Institute of Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Prof. Keinan was born (1947) and educated in Israel, served in the Israeli Defense Force (Captain, combat unit), married with six children and three grandchildren. He received his B.Sc. degree from Tel-Aviv University (1970), M.Sc. from Ben-Gurion University with Prof. L. H. Zalkow (natural products chemistry), and Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science (1977) with Prof. Y. Mazur (the dry ozonation technology).

Following his post doctoral research (1977-1980) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison with Prof. B. M. Trost (synthetic applications of organopalladium chemistry) he joined the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science and established a research lab that focused on organometallic chemistry, organic synthesis and applied enzymology. In 1987 he moved to the Technion, expanding the scope of his research to include the synthesis of antitumor agents, liquid crystals, and antibody catalysis. In 1991 he established another independent laboratory at the The Scripps Research Institute, focusing on catalytic antibodies, synthetic enzymes and synthesis of antitumor agents. His group has developed a combinatorial synthetic approach to Annonaceous acetogenins, they have demonstrated the first use of catalytic antibodies in the total synthesis of natural products, proved that antibodies in an aqueous medium can catalyze reactions which are strongly disfavored in water, and showed that antibodies can perturb the coordination geometry of a transition metal complex.

Prof. Keinan has published about 150 scientific papers, 15 patents and edited 3 books and 2 special issues of the Israel Journal of Chemistry. His most recent book “Catalytic Antibodies” is the first and most comprehensive volume that covers this field. He has been awarded the Joseph and Madeleine Nash Career Development Chair, he was a visiting Professor in the University of Paris VI. He was awarded the New England Award for Academic Excellence, the Shannon Award of NIH, the CapCure Award, the Herschel-Rich Award for scientific excellence, the Technion Prize for security technologies, He is a member of the editorial board of the Israel Journal of Chemistry and a member of the international advisory board of Enzyme and Microbial Technology. For one year he was the president of The Israel Chemical Society. He is the President of the International Forum of Bio-Inspired Engineering (IFBIE). He was the founder and first Head of the Institute of Catalysis Science and Technology (ICST) in the Technion.

Research interests

v Biocatalysis with antibodies and with synthetic enzymes.

v Organic synthesis.

v Organometallic chemistry.

v Molecular computing devices.

v Synthetic receptors and molecular machines.

v Drug discovery:

· Anti-cancer agents

· Anti-arrhythmic drugs

· Anti-asthma drugs