800 High School Students participated in the annual Tech Women event at Technion

Tech Women encourages outstanding female students to continue their academic studies in science & engineering

From Kiryat Shmona to Beer Sheva, Ashdod, and the Golan Heights, over 800 outstanding female high school students from all over Israel attended the Tech Women 2018 event (21^st November 2018), hosted by Technion to encourage outstanding female pupils to opt for science and engineering in their academic careers. This 4^th annual event was made possible through the generosity of the Rosalyn August GEM Initiative.

In honor of the event, Rosalyn August arrived at Technion with her eldest granddaughter, Lauren. Rosalyn was born in a small town in Virginia, USA. The daughter of immigrant parents who opened a small jewelry shop which in time turned into a prosperous business. As a young woman growing up during the ’60s, Rosalyn felt a dissonance between what she wanted to become and what society at large, and her own family, in particular, felt suitable for her.

Rosalyn shared with the students that her acquaintance with Technion began a decade ago.  She felt an instant bond with the quiet, underplayed vibe of the place. “There are many fields worthy of a donation, yet I chose Technion,” Rosalyn said. “Even though I don’t know much about technology, it is clear to me that technology is our future and it is our duty to help integrate women into this field. Trust yourselves, find what you love and love what you do.”

All of the students who were invited to participate in the event study mathematics and other science and technology related subjects, at the highest level of accreditation. During the event, they met with female researchers, faculty, and graduate students. They visited the laboratories and heard about the various fields of research and study.

When Technion was opened in 1924, female students comprised 6% of the student population, a ratio of 1 to 17. Gradually, and especially during the past decade, the number of female students at Technion has grown considerably, and today they account for 40% of the student population.

The students attended lectures and visited the labs of 10 engineering and science faculties:  Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Biotechnology and Food Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry and the William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management.

In her opening remarks, Prof. Marcelle Machluf, Dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering said, “I have always had to prove myself and being the only woman in the room drives me even further in doing so. Women are the future and I encourage each and every one of you to come and study at the Technion. You all have talent and the ability to succeed, with or without affirmative action.”

Dr. Efrat Sabach who completed her doctoral thesis at Technion’s Faculty of Physics, said,  “When I said that I wanted to study physics I was told that I would be the only girl among many boys but that didn’t scare me, I always asked questions and I was always given a legitimacy for these questions.”

With regards to her thesis, under the guidance of Prof. Noam Soker, Dr. Sabach said, “I am an astrophysicist who studies processes in space and even though I am the only woman in my research team I have never felt unequal to the others.”

Sara Nagosa, a Ph.D. student at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine said that she chose Technion because she wanted to study at the best academic institute. “At first I was scared, but then I understood that if I don’t try I will never know if I am capable and that is how I made it to today, the final year of my doctoral thesis. Technion gave me more than knowledge, it provided me with determination, perseverance, and tools for life.”

When you think of electrical engineers you probably do not have me in mind, but here I am, a woman with a doctoral degree, at the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering, said Dr. Adi Hanuka.

Dr. Hanuka told the students about the two projects which she has been leading over the past years: the first, a miniature particle accelerator intended for use in X-ray and radiation equipment and the second, an Eyelid Motion Monitor (EMM) for diagnosing various diseases.

During my doctoral thesis, I traveled to the USA to continue my studies at Stanford University. The people in my research team were surprised that I was female, and someone even pointed out that girls are not supposed to study electrical engineering but rather psychology or economics. This leads me to say that it is not enough to strengthen only the girls and relay to them how capable they are, but also to ‘educate’ boys in a way that will make them see that girls do not fall short with regards to talent and ability.”

Found In Translation: Algorithm Could Speed Up Development of New Medical Therapies

HAIFA, ISRAEL (November 27, 2018) – In findings published today in Nature Methods, Israeli and American researchers reported on a revolutionary, big data-driven, machine learning algorithm designed to predict results of human gene expression based on preliminary results of mouse studies. The tool, which is expected to speed up the development of new medical therapies and may reduce future experiments done on mice, was developed by researchers from the research team of Assistant Professor Shai Shen-Orr from the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion, together with Professor Rob Tibshirani and Ph.D. candidate Wenfei Du from Stanford University.  The study was led by Technion Ph.D. candidate Rachelly Normand.

Use of laboratory mice for basic and preclinical research is essential to advance medicine and develop new medicines and therapies around the world. Mouse model studies are critical in experiments that cannot be performed in humans due to ethical considerations, including the study of diseases and physiological processes in the brain, spleen, and heart and in testing the efficacy of new treatments for certain diseases.

But despite the common use of lab mice, extrapolations of mouse study results in understanding the effects of such treatment in humans is not always straightforward. This is due to the many physiological, genetic, life expectancy and environment differences between the two species. In other words, many effects are “lost in translation” in the mouse-to-human transfer and many drugs that are effective in lab mice fail when tested in humans. The tool developed at the Technion, which predicts the relevance of preliminary mouse test results to human physiology, could speed up the development of new drugs and dramatically reduce the cost of development.

One of the developments that enabled this breakthrough is a relatively new norm: uploading raw data from scientific studies to the internet. This change, which began with the human genome project, has evolved and grown, and there are now measurements of more than 2 million samples registered online. Most were collected from tissues of human patients and disease animal models.  The levels of mRNA – a central component in protein production – were measured in each sample – covering tens of thousands of genes in the genome.

“This is a huge amount of data – a tremendous amount of information on the internet, which is generally not used beyond the study in which it was generated,” explained Assistant Professor Shen-Orr.  “The assumption in my laboratory is that these data hold hidden treasures which can be extracted using creative thinking and algorithm development.  In the current study, we decided to leverage this information to address the problem of translating animal model findings to insights relevant to humans.  In other words, in this study, we bridge the “cross-species gap” arising from the differences between humans and animal models.”

Assistant Professor Shen-Orr, Rachelly Normand and their colleagues developed an algorithm that better “translates” the experiments that were conducted in mice and enables extrapolation of the implications they will have on human physiology.  The system is called FIT (an abbreviation of Found in Translation, a play on “Lost in Translation”). Using this big data – a great deal of the information accrued in prior studies and which has collected on the internet – the system learns the relationship between gene expression in mice and an equivalent human condition. Given a new animal study, such as the evaluation of a new pharmaceutical treatment, the system identifies, for each gene, whether the information collected from prior studies is relevant and beneficial for the new study.  If the information is relevant, the system adjusts the results measured in the new study and enables investigators to interpret the new study findings in mice such that it is relevant to humans.

The researchers evaluated FIT’s performance in 170 different mouse studies and demonstrated that in 88% of the cases FIT is predicted to be relevant to the new mouse experiment, the system indeed correctly predicted the gene expression profile in the analogous disease state in humans. This improves the mouse-to-humans inference by 50%.  In addition, the researchers tested the predictive power of FIT in a Crohn’s disease mouse model. FIT predicted that the ILF3 gene will be expressed in humans, despite the fact that it is not expressed in mice.  In a validation experiment, the researchers showed that the protein product of the ILF3 gene is indeed expressed in Crohn’s patient samples – a result not previously known and which would not have been discovered without using the machine-learning algorithm.

“This process not only improves research accuracy,” summarized Assistant Professor Shen-Orr, “but also prevents false leads and shortens drug and therapy development processes.”

Click here for the paper in Nature Methods

 

 

A 6-student delegation recently visited Uganda within the framework of a new course at the Technion Faculty of Medicine

Six students from the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion recently returned from a working visit to Uganda. They participated in a new course entitled “Medicine in low-income countries,” and worked for several weeks in a rural hospital in Kiboga, Uganda. The Israeli Brit Olam non-governmental organization operates a medical aid program in this hospital.

“One thing that caught my attention and amazed me was the acceptance of the reality,” recounted student participant Uri Shemesh. “All the family members we met see their loved ones suffering and even dying. It very obviously pains them, but they apparently understand that this is life in Africa and under the prevailing conditions sometimes little can be done to help. In contrast to what we are used to in Israel, none of the family members turned to us for help when we entered the department each morning.  They would wait patiently until we approached them, and even then, they seemed to have reconciled to the situation, with death – as if anything we could do was considered a bonus. I remember one case of a 10-year-old boy who came to the hospital with pain and 40° C temperature and couldn’t get out of bed for several days. His father just stood next to him day and night, without referring to us or asking for anything. Each time we approached his son, he just returned a thank you motion with his hands.”

While Israeli medical teams travel to developing countries in aid delegations, this is the first time Israeli medical students were given the opportunity to do so within the framework of an academic program with a tutor. The delegation was led (voluntarily) by Dr. D. A., a member of the Air Force Rescue Unit. Since the Uganda hospital had no imaging facilities, Dr. D.A. arranged a donation of a portable ultrasound unit and a simulator to learn the topic. This enabled the delegation members to perform imaging tests on their own, with online support from Israeli experts. Dr. Nira Beck, a Technion Faculty member and Director of the Ultrasound Unit at Rambam Hospital, assisted in this program.

The simulator was developed by Simbionix –  a world-leader in the creation of simulators to practice complex medical procedures. The simulators enable medical teams to improve their clinical skills in a safe learning environment, which shortens the user’s learning curve.

Dr. D.A. summed up that “during our 14-day stay at the Kiboga General Hospital, we tended to tens of patients of various ages, suffering from a wide range of medical problems – internal illnesses, orthopedic problems, trauma injuries, surgical problems, and others. Some of the ailments were unique to Africa, while others were no different than those we meet daily in Israel, but the lack of resources and the very limited range of diagnostic, monitoring and therapeutic options, forced us to improvise and generate solutions ex nihilo. Although we were there for a very short period of time, I think it was a building experience. I am confident that the students learned a lot about the medical profession and about themselves and others. I hope that this experience will turn the participants into better doctors and possibly even better people who will continue to express interest and contribute to the development of medicine in developing countries.”

The delegation was masterminded by Dr. Ami Neuberger, a faculty member at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, a senior doctor at the Rambam Medical Center and a specialist in internal medicine and infectious diseases.  He has worked previously in Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, Nepal, Ivory Coast and South America and is currently the Director of the Travelers Clinic at Rambam Hospital. He explained that “during my visits to developing countries, I saw that leading Western universities send medical students to clinical rotations, and thought that it would be befitting for the Technion to do the same. It is important to be exposed to the reality of life in underdeveloped countries and is it also important to learn about diseases that do not exist in Israel. Luckily, my idea was embraced by Professor Shimon Marom, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and by Professor Ruth Margalit, a faculty member who has been involved in medical assistance to low-resource countries for years.”

Before the delegation set out, they went through a week of preparation that included lectures about the “Israeli medicine on the equator” project run by “Brit Olam”, lectures about tropical diseases and diseases common in Uganda, as well as discussions relating to the social and cultural interactions between a foreign medical team and the local population. The preparation was delivered by healthcare professionals from various hospitals, on a voluntary basis.

“Despite the high cost of the trip and the extensive amount of time dedicated to it,” said Dr. Neuberger, “we had ten candidates for each of the six available spots.”

The students who traveled to Africa were:

Ravit Gabai Yehezkeli (28) lives in Moshav Balfouria, near Afula. “My greatest hobby is to discover new things.  Already as a child, I moved over 20 times due to my father’s military service. Each house was an opportunity to discover a new place, to hike in a new area and to meet new people.  Ever since I continue to nurture this hobby by traveling throughout the world.” At the Faculty of Medicine, she combines her medical studies with muscle regeneration research.

Daniel Brue (29) is originally from Ramat Hasharon, and currently living in Haifa.  Daniel earned her BSc in Animal Sciences and will soon begin her fifth year of medical studies at the Faculty of Medicine. “I first traveled to Africa after my army service, and traveled the continent over several months, and volunteered for two months in an orphanage. I was taken by the magic of Africa and fell in love with the culture, the people and the scenery. Ever since I have dreamed of returning to experience it and to contribute on a professional level.”

Manar Baderna (23) was born in Sakhnin to two lawyers and grew up in Haifa. While studying at the Technion, she teaches in the Yoel Geva psychometric exam school. “I love to cook and travel.”

Ori Shemesh (29) lives in Ramat Gan and is due to get married in two months. He completed his BSc in Neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and will be beginning his fifth-year medical school. “In the past, I was a guitarist, playing mainly jazz and blues, but in recent years, it has turned into a hobby only.”

David Weiman (26) moved to Israel from Belgium 8 years ago. He served in the Givati Division and then completed his degree in Medical Sciences at Tel Aviv University. He will soon begin his fifth year of medical school studies at the Technion.

Nitzan Molho-Stav (28) is from Tel Aviv. “I love yoga, to travel abroad and to discover new places.” Nitzan recounts a story that particularly touched her heart when with the medical delegation in Africa.  A 13-year-old girl arrived in a life-threatening state with type I diabetes. “She was hospitalized and, most of the time was there alone. We treated her until her condition stabilized and when we wanted to discharge her, we understood that she didn’t have any insulin, which is vital for daily stabilization of her blood sugar levels.  We bought her a months-worth of insulin, which is considered very expensive there. A few days later, she was re-admitted in a life-threatening state. When we asked her if she had injected her insulin as we had explained to her, she said that she hadn’t – because she didn’t have any insulin. It’s impossible to know if she lost it or had to sell it, or didn’t grasp the severity of her condition and how much her life was dependent on this drug.  Bottom line, she is a 13-year-old child with a chronic disease and she has to take responsibility for her life as if she were an adult.”

 

Dr. Naama Geva-Zatorsky of the Technion Has Won the Azrieli Foundation’s Prestigious CIFAR Fellowship

The 12 recipients were selected from 402 candidates from 55 countries

Dr. Naama Geva-Zatorsky of the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine has received a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR )scholarship from the Azrieli Foundation. This year, 402 researchers from 55 countries submitted their candidacy for the scholarship, and the Foundation selected 12 winners from five countries: Israel, Singapore, the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada. Two of the winners are Israeli: Dr. Geva-Zatorsky and Dr. Yaniv Ziv of the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Neurobiology.

The researchers were selected based on excellence in research, potential contribution to the relevant program in CIFAR, and leadership potential outside the academy. The fund announced the winners last week and noted that the diverse areas of research interest include renewable energy, astrophysics, understanding consciousness, and the microbiota’s effect on human evolution and health.

Dr. Geva-Zatorsky studies the microbiota – the microbial population that exists in our body and plays a critical role in our health. In her research, published in CELL, Science, and other leading journals, she has shown that the microbiota dramatically affect the immune system’s functions. While at Harvard, she developed a new technology that can track live intestinal bacteria in a living organism in real time. She says, “Our technology allows us to identify the role of each bacterium in this process. In the future, we hope to produce drugs from these bacteria, customized to various immune system disruptions and diseases.”

Dr. Geva-Zatorsky completed her bachelor’s degree at Tel Aviv University and her MSc and PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science. After a postdoctoral research at the Harvard Medical School, she joined the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and the Technion Integrated Cancer Center. She has been awarded the Alon Fellowship – a prestigious scholarship designed to enable the absorption of young researchers in Israeli universities – and was selected as a Horev Fellow in the Technion’s program for leaders in science and technology.

CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars Program

According to the Azrieli Foundation’s website, “CIFAR has been successfully taking on difficult challenges for more than three decades by undertaking global research programs connecting many of the world’s best minds – across borders and between disciplines – to shape new perspectives and spark groundbreaking ideas. CIFAR offers research fellows the rarest of commodities: freedom to take the kinds of intellectual risks that are essential for creating truly transformative knowledge.”

The CIFAR scholarship provides researchers who are just beginning their academic careers with funding and support in building academic ties and developing the skills necessary for research leadership in academia and beyond. Since its inception in 1982, CIFAR has selected about 400 promising researchers. Each recipient receives a $100,000 research grant and is integrated into one of CIFAR’s 12 programs for two years. The program helps participants present their research to colleagues, contribute to discussions, initiate new collaborations, and reach policymakers, industry leaders and others.

“Young people are the future of research,” said CIFAR President and CEO Alan Bernstein. “CIFAR is exceptionally pleased to provide financial and other support to this phenomenal group of young researchers to advance their leadership and financial skills. Their enthusiasm and energy lead to new ways of thinking that will advance science and create solutions for the challenges facing our world today.”

For the Azrieli Foundation’s announcement about the CIFAR Global Scholars, click here

 

Prof. Hossam Haick Won the EU Innovation Award for the SniffPhone Project

Prof. Hossam Haick from the Technion Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering received the European Commission “2018 Innovation Award: Most Innovative Project” on behalf of the SniffPhone Project. The award was presented in Lisbon on November 21, at the European Forum of Electronic Components and Systems (EFECS).

The SniffPhone Project, established and coordinated by Prof. Hossam Haick with the support of the Horizon 2020 ICT-02a-2014 Program, is a collaboration of nine partners from six countries. SniffPhone is a compact handheld device for early diagnosis of cancer. The high-accuracy device is low-cost, non-invasive, and easy to use. The SniffPhone project integrates micro- and nano-technologies to create an autonomous system that can be connected to smart devices and can analyze disease markers from exhaled breath. The breath sample is tested via a miniaturized array of highly sensitive nanosensors and processed by a microfluidic lab-on-a-chip. The electrical signals are transferred via the smart device to a server. Statistical pattern recognition is applied to the received data and a clinical report including the screening results is sent back to the attending medical professional. SniffPhone represents a new concept in healthcare, taking into consideration ethical aspects. SniffPhone has an unparalleled advantage over traditional screening methods and provides a simple and cost-effective alternative for medical professionals.

The core technology, containing innovative nanosensors for breath analysis, was developed by the Technion team. Nanosensors for defining the breathing protocol were developed by NanoVation-GS Ltd. – a Technion spin-off company. The micropump was developed by Cellix in Ireland, fluidics by Microfluidic ChipShop in Germany, and the cloud platform by VTT in Finland. The clinical studies were carried out at the University of Latvia in Riga, with further testing and technical experimentation done in Austria at the University of Innsbruck. Siemens has taken part in the testing and validation phase of the SniffPhone project and conducted usability studies. JLM Innovation, Germany provides system integration, the device software, the SniffPhone App and algorithms for the measurement system.

The 2018 Innovation Award was presented on the 21st of November in Lisbon, at the European Forum for Electronic Components and System (EFECS) in the presence of EU leadership and the Israeli Ambassador in Portugal Rafi Gamzo; Dr. Jan Mitrovics – CEO JLM Innovation GmbH and SniffPhone partner was called to join Prof. Haick in receiving the award.

Prof. Haick serves as a consultant to several spin-off companies from his laboratories at Technion, and leads three EU consortia, with numerous collaborators in, academia and the health system.  He holds numerous patents and was named one of the World’s 35 Innovators Under the age of 35 (MIT, 2008); and more recently one of the world’s 100 leading innovators. He has won many honors, including “Knight in the Order of Academic Palms” granted by the French Government; the Humboldt Award, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Award; and the Hilda and Hershel Rich Technion Innovation Award.

 

Technion researchers develop new approach to selectively create and study complex organic molecules at will

The simple two-step groundbreaking methodology is highly selective, diverse, cost and time-efficient

Haifa Israel – Israeli researchers from the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology have developed a new methodology to selectively and efficiently prepare and investigate complex organic molecules at will. The findings are presented in a new paper published by the prestigious journal Nature Chemistry. The study was conducted by Professor Ilan Marek and two members of his team Dr. David Pierrot and Dr. Jeffrey Bruffaerts of The Mallat Family Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at The Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion.

Organic synthesis is the practice of constructing organic compounds – chemical compounds that contain carbon atoms. The aim of this branch of chemistry is to allow scientists to create and study any organic molecules at will, regardless of their complexity.  As such, synthetic chemists are on a never-ending quest for new and innovative methodologies to develop faster, more cost-efficient and highly selective transformations.

“One of the ultimate challenges that exist in this field is to be able to make transformations that are geometrically stable but also highly selective and to have access on demand to any single molecule,” says Prof. Marek. “In our research, we seek new methodologies and conceptual approaches for these crucial problems with elegance and simplicity.”

Every carbon atom has the ability to form four bonds.  A molecule containing at least a carbon atom with four different substituents is likely to have differing properties from its enantiomer (mirror image, sort of like right and left hands). In organic chemistry, the ability to selectively create and investigate each molecule is of crucial importance – as one mirror image can turn out to be a cure and the other a poison, as for the sadly famous story of thalidomide.

Adding to this equation, noncyclic systems, which means the molecules are arranged linearly and are constantly in motion or rotating; numerous carbon atoms with multiple stereocenters (points in a molecule with groups of atoms that when interchanged form such mirror images), and the vicinity of these stereocenters presents further layers of complexity.

In their research, the Technion scientists were able to devise an innovative two-step approach to selectively create and study numerous such complex molecules with simplicity and efficiency.

In the first step, the researchers prepared molecules in a cyclic, or ring-like formation. The rings are strained and not flexible and so it is easier to selectively control where to position each atom.

Then, the researchers used a catalyst and selectively chose to break the ringed bond at a specific point.  In the experiment, the researchers took advantage of an oxygen atom which was specifically set in the molecule in the first step, acting as a crane, to direct the whole transformation while controlling all the successive events, essentially tailor designing a domino reaction.

The strategy’s versatility arises from the substituent interchangeability. This leads the molecules to become interchangeable, like Lego bricks, so that after completing these two steps, the researchers were able to create and study a single product each time out of 16 such possible products.

The results enabled the researchers to access a broad family of structures which, using available methods, would be inaccessible with such levels of selectivity, diversity, cost and time-efficiency; making their research of particular interest to the academic world, as well as for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

“This is an approach that has attracted more and more interest because it allows you to create very complex systems, which often cost a lot of time and money and were until now impossible to even create, in a fast and simple way,” says Prof. Marek. “What we have developed is a new methodology, or a toolbox, that will benefit the global scientific community. Scientists can now use this method to build on and further expand their research across many different applications.”

Prof. Ilan Marek was born in Israel and moved with his family to France as an infant. In 1988 he completed his doctorate at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, and after a short postdoctoral stay in Belgium, he returned to the same university as an independent researcher. In 1997, after 34 years in France, he returned to Israel and joined the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He now heads the Mallat Family Laboratory of Organic Chemistry and holds the Sir Michael and Lady Sobell Academic Chair.

Prof. Marek was inaugurated as a member of the French Academy of Sciences earlier this year. He has won numerous awards, including the Weizmann Prize for Exact Sciences, the Israel Chemical Society Award for Excellence, the Janssen Pharmaceutica Prize for Academic Excellence, the Bessel Award of the Humboldt Foundation, the Royal Society Chemistry organometallic Award, the Yigal Alon Fellowship, the Michael Bruno Memorial Award, the Taub Award for Academic Excellence, twice the ERC advanced research grants and awards for excellence in teaching, including the Yanai Prize awarded by the Technion.  He is also an editorial board member of numerous leading journals in organic synthesis.

Click here for the paper

Technion launches t-hub, a new Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Technion won a NIS 10 million grant from Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE) in the “New Campus Vision” competition

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology won a NIS 10 million grant for the advancement of entrepreneurship and innovation as part of a “New Campus Vision” competition of the Council for Higher Education. Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Chair of the CHE’s Planning and Budgeting Committee Prof. Yaffa Zilbershats announced the winners.

The grant will be used to establish t-hub – The Technion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, based on the strategic plan for entrepreneurship and innovation formulated by the university during the past two years. Technion is the only academic institution to win the competition individually.

“The grant from the Council for Higher Education comes at a perfect time,” said President of the Technion Prof. Peretz Lavie. “Two years ago we initiated a comprehensive initiative aimed at developing and promoting entrepreneurship and innovation activities on the Haifa campus connecting them to the new branches of Technion in New York and China.  The grant will enable the Technion to make a significant change in the scope of its entrepreneurial activities and to realize the establishment of the Technion Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, t-hub, which will take the entrepreneurial culture on campus to new heights.”

Since its establishment, the Technion has championed the integration of basic science and applied research, striving to advance scientific knowledge while cultivating the desire to exploit it for the benefit of humanity.

Technion has nurtured entrepreneurial thinking for many years and has pioneered the development of curricula for all students. The first entrepreneurship course was founded 30 years ago on campus, initiated by Distinguished Prof. Dan Shechtman, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry.

Technion alumni are largely responsible for the creation of the “Start-Up Nation.” Within 20 years, since 1995, Technion alumni have established more than 1,600 companies that have generated more than $30 billion and created nearly 100,000 jobs. The university is also regarded worldwide as an incubator that fosters entrepreneurship and was recently ranked 39th in the world in the number of patents registered in the United States in 2017.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are embedded in Technion’s DNA and much of the research conducted by faculty members has led to applications benefitting Israel and the world. A recent example is Mazor Robotics, which started out in the robotics lab of Prof. Moshe Shoham of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Technion and was recently sold to Medtronic for $1.6 billion.

“Technion goals in entrepreneurship and innovation are to develop and promote technological and scientific excellence among its students, teachers, and researchers while providing tools for creative and entrepreneurial thinking,” said Prof. Adam Shwartz, Technion Senior Executive Vice President and Chair of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center.  “These tools are designed to solve engineering, technological and scientific challenges over the course of a professional career – whether in start-up companies, in industrial, civilian, or security companies, in companies that benefit the public or in academia. Technion will integrate such thinking and activity in all its components and will establish the Entrepreneurship Center to concentrate, promote, and empower the entrepreneurial culture throughout the campus.”

t-hub will serve as a focal point for all entrepreneurial activities of Technion faculties; will encourage entrepreneurial thinking through teaching, research, and practical experience; and enable each student, faculty member, and others to experience entrepreneurial activities through centralized activities as well as by encouraging local initiatives.

The Center will integrate values of entrepreneurship and creativity into campus culture, in study programs and in applying and commercializing research results with the aim of training engineers and scientists to lead technological innovation in Israel. This center will lead in harnessing the scientific activity on campus for the benefit of the Israeli economy and the world.

t-hub will turn Technion into a leading center for scientific-technological initiatives that will serve the university and its surrounding environment.  The Center will train Israel’s next technology leaders and strengthen its economy out of a national responsibility for promoting Israel through research, development, and technology.  The Center will be headed by Prof. Eyal Zussman, the Center’s academic director and Dr. Dana Sheffer.

The Technion’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center has many partners among Israel’s leading industrial and hi-tech companies including Teva, Rafael, and Alpha Omega.

“The establishment of an entrepreneurship center at the Technion is a necessary step for the northern region which will lead to a change in the socio-economic situation in the area,” said Technion alumnus Imad Younis, President of Alpha Omega. “In light of the high level of technological education at Technion, and in view of the entrepreneurship gap between Israel’s center and its periphery, Technion is the academic body best suited to connect the various populations in the periphery and lead a significant change in the field of entrepreneurship making it accessible to all.”

“Rafael is proud to be a partner in the Technion Entrepreneurship Center and is happy that it won,” said Technion alumnus Dr. Irit Idan, executive vice president of research development at Rafael. “The two entities have been intertwined for seventy years of partnership. The Entrepreneurship Center at Technion and the Entrepreneurship Center at Rafael in Teradion will work synergetically as a hub for incubation and innovation.”

“Teva is proud to create a new and unique framework of academic-industrial cooperation with Technion, which will support the mutual needs and objectives of both sides to promote Israeli innovation, the development of a talent pool, and to train the next generation of industry leadership in Israel, especially in bio-pharma,” said Iris Beck-Codner, Executive Vice President of Global Brand & Communications at Teva. “This cooperation represents another tier of Teva’s commitment to the State of Israel – as outlined by the President and CEO Kåre Schultz – while strengthening the company’s global management headquarters in Israel, research and development, and production activities in Israel.”

An international research team solved the genome sequence and genome structure of the fatal sleep parasite Trypanosoma brucei.  The parasite is transmitted via African tsetse fly bites and causes fatal sleeping sickness. The discovery may lead to the development of new treatments for the disease

Using an innovative genome sequence assembly method developed by Dr. Noam Kaplan of the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, an international research group has deciphered the genetic code of the parasite that causes sleeping sickness in sub-Saharan Africa.

The journal Nature reports on the breakthrough in the understanding of the genome of the fatal parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which causes fatal “sleeping sickness” among humans. The researchers deciphered the sequence and 3D organization of the parasite’s genome. They suggest that this achievement may later assist in curbing the fatal disease, common mostly in the forests and water bodies of central Africa.

The international study was led by Prof. Nicolai Siegel of the University of Munich, and involved researchers from Germany, USA, UK and Israel.  Technion.

Trypanosoma brucei is transmitted to humans and other mammals via the tse-tse fly, which enables the parasite to proliferate in its salivary glands, and infects mammals while sucking their blood. The researchers hope that understanding the genome of this parasite will lead to the development of techniques to block its fatal activity.

The genome is the total genetic information of each organism.  It is a very complex sequence which may consist of billions of bases (DNA units); the last two decades have witnessed a major leap in the ability to decipher it.

According to Dr. Kaplan, “It is very simple today to read millions of short DNA fragments, but very long fragments cannot be read. Therefore, the main challenge is to properly arrange the short segments, much like putting together a puzzle – a process known as genome assembly.”

Dr. Kaplan already addressed this challenge during his post-doctoral fellowship with Prof. Job Dekker at the University of Massachusetts. The technology he developed is based on an experiment in which the spatial proximity of DNA fragments is measured in live cells. In an article published in 2013 in Nature Biotechnology, he demonstrated that advanced computational analysis of these proximity patterns can be used to assemble an entire human genome.  “This method,” he explained, “bridged the ‘scale gaps’ in genome assembly and is applicable to any species.”

Since the development of this genome assembly new approach, a number of companies implementing this idea have been established, and recently, several major genomes of animals and plants have been solved, including the frog, mosquito, goat, quinoa, wheat and barley genomes. And now, it is the Trypanosoma brucei’s turn.

In the current study, the researchers discovered a unique relationship between the spatial organization of the genome and the mechanism that switches antigens – the protein recognized by the human immune system.  The antigenic switching mechanism enables Trypanosoma brucei to evade the immune system of affected individuals. The researchers suggest this discovery may enable future development of parasites that will protect at-risk populations.

Dr. Kaplan joined the Technion Faculty of Medicine in 2016 and established an interdisciplinary laboratory “since a combination of many disciplines, including biology, computing, mathematics, statistics, physics and chemistry, is needed to understand the genome.” The lab studies how the genome’s 3D organization is determined and how this organization affects genome function. Dr. Kaplan’s research team is also working on the next generation of genome assembly methods, which will assist in characterizing and understanding the genomic changes that occur in cancer and other diseases.

The current article in Nature and Dr. Kaplan’s 2013 publication in Nature Biotechnology, where he reports on the novel genomic scaffolding method based on spatial proximity.

Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, will join the EuroTech Universities Alliance as of 1 January 2019. Made public on the occasion of the Alliance’s annual High-Level Event in Brussels on 6 November, the announcement follows the accession of France’s École Polytechnique to the Alliance in June 2018. This step increases the Alliance’s membership base, and will further strengthen its position as a pioneer for inter-university collaboration.

“The EuroTech Universities are excellent research-based universities recognized within their innovation eco-systems as highly dynamic motors with an outstanding capacity to help translate basic research into societal solutions”, says Jan Mengelers, President of the EuroTech Universities Alliance. “With the EuroTech Universities Alliance, we are pooling our complementary research strengths and connecting our innovation ecosystems for more impact. Technion is a “perfect match” to join – and boost this joint endeavour, given its scientific excellence and vibrant innovation ecosystem.”

Boasting 84 ERC grants under the EU’s FP7 and Horizon 2020 programmes as well as 90 spin-off companies, Technion is a striking example of how excellent fundamental science translates into impact.

“Technion is thrilled and honoured to join the EuroTech Universities Alliance”, said Technion President, Prof. Peretz Lavie. “We live in an era in which international and interdisciplinary collaborations are vital to the future of scientific research. We bring the ‘Technion way’ of doing things to this partnership: reaching our goals faster and with fewer resources. The combination with the great strengths of the other members of the alliance, which comprises an elite group of European universities similar to Technion, will help us ensure we are at the forefront of scientific research, benefiting millions worldwide. “

The EuroTech Universities Alliance stimulates collaboration across education, research, and innovation, thereby increasing the attraction of global top talent needed to drive modernization, excellence, and societal impact. For instance, the existing EuroTech Postdoc programme provides 80 promising fellows unique access to the research expertise and infrastructures across the EuroTech Universities while at the same time offering exclusive entrepreneurship and mobility opportunities in several of Europe’s top high-tech ecosystems.

Today’s societal challenges can only be addressed by collaboration in education, research, and innovation across the EU and internationally. Recognizing what alliances of universities can achieve when pooling resources and combining strengths, the European Commission launched a pilot scheme in support of European university networks on 24 October 2018. At its annual High-Level Event in Brussels on 6 November, the EuroTech Universities Alliance facilitated a very timely and encouraging debate on the role of university alliances in driving the University of the Future.

 

Professor Deborah Estrin, founder, and director of the Health Tech Hub at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and associate dean of Cornell Tech has been awarded a 2018 MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her innovative work using mobile devices and data to address social challenges.

MacArthur fellows receive a no-strings-attached award – widely known as the “genius grant” – of $625,000 over five years.

In their description of Prof. Estrin’s work, the MacArthur Foundation noted that Prof. Estrin was among the first to ascertain the potential of using the digital traces of our daily lives for participatory mobile health, and that “Our increasing reliance on personal electronic devices, such as cell phones, GPS, and fitness trackers, and online tools such as banking and shopping, generates an enormous amount of data about our personal behavior patterns—what Prof. Estrin calls ‘small data.’”

In an interview with the Cornell Chronicle, Prof. Estrin said, “I was and remain very humbled and grateful. I feel a sense of commitment to do good by it, and to live up to it.”

In 2011, Prof. Estrin and collaborators launched Open mHealth, an open-source software architecture to integrate various types of small data that could be used to build customized applications that address specific health conditions. Open mHealth avoids the proliferation of redundant, non-interoperable digital health services, and its scalability encourages wider adoption of mobile health technologies by individuals, researchers, and medical care providers.

MacArthur said that Prof. Estrin is also working to empower individuals to gain access to, curate, and ultimately act upon their personal small data. She and colleagues at the Small Data Lab are developing several platforms and applications for management and use of personal data.

According to Prof. Estrin, who is also a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and of health care policy and research at Weill Cornell Medicine, privacy considerations are central to her work. She believes it is possible to leverage insights from digital traces without overly compromising individual privacy.

“The same data that is useful to help understand how someone is responding to a therapy or a drug is also data that can be very exposing about them,” she said. “I am interested in developing new ways to put these data and technologies to use in a way that is more privacy-aware from the perspective of the user and context than is typical in our social media-dominated online lives.”

Zoom Donates Video Communications Services to Technion

Tech Leaders from Silicon Valley and Israel Celebrate with Visit to Zoom HQ

Zoom Video Communications, Inc. announced that it has gifted a university-wide deployment of its video communications suite to the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, which consistently ranks among the world’s top science and technology research universities. This gift, spearheaded by Technion alumnus and Zoom head of product Oded Gal, provides every student, staff, and alumni with a Technion or partner school email address a Zoom account, affording them an unlimited video and audio communication and a rich set of collaboration tools across desktop and mobile.

“I am immensely proud to bring Zoom to my alma mater. Innovation runs deep in the Technion, and their graduates bring so many gifts to Israel and the world. It is gratifying to bring them this gift.” – Oded Gal

Zoom’s video communications services will be used to connect more than 14,000 Technion students, over 550 faculty, over 1,000 technical and administrative staff, 250 clinicians, and 950 adjuncts and instructors across multiple campuses, as well as up to 100,000 alumni.

The Technion offers international programs in the United States and China with two partnering schools: Founded as a joint academic venture between Cornell University and Technion, The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute is an integral part of Cornell Tech, located on Roosevelt Island in NYC. The Guangdong Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is a public technological institute and non-profit research university located in the in the city of Shantou, Guangdong province, China. Zoom will be used to connect Technion with these institutions for greater collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The connection between Zoom and Technion is a natural one. Listed as third on the 2018 Forbes Cloud 100 and located in the heart of the Silicon Valley, Zoom is among the most innovative technology companies in the world. It earned many early adopters in the Israel tech industry. Technion graduates bring the unique skills and knowledge that helped Israel earn the nickname “Start-Up Nation.” They constitute more than 70% of the country’s high-tech industry founders and managers.

“Zoom enables the Varonis Systems global teams to connect, including our offices in Israel and seven other countries, so they can collaborate seamlessly in real-time. Video is crucial for growing understanding across distances and cultures – Zoom enables us to build trust, move faster, and create the next generation of data security and analytics,” said Lior Gal, director of IT at Varonis Systems.

“Zoom has a mature and cutting-edge technology for delivering video and audio content for higher education. It can serve faculty, staff, and students while combining unique interoperability features with our current e-learning tools and systems. Incorporating Zoom with Moodle gives our staff the ability to deliver courses from anywhere to students in all three Technion international campuses, in Israel, the US, and China,” explained Zeev Schneider, deputy CIO at the Technion IIT.

The announcement was made during a visit by Technion president, Prof. Peretz Lavie, at Zoom headquarters in San Jose, California. “Zoom is an incredible technology. The ability to come together face-to-face is crucial for both ideation and education. Zoom will help Technion in its task of educating the next generation of global technology innovators,” said President Lavie.

“I am immensely proud to bring Zoom to my alma mater,” said Gal. “Innovation runs deep in the Technion, and their graduates bring so many gifts to Israel and the world. It is gratifying to bring them this gift.”

The Technion will roll out its Zoom deployment now through 2019.