New Appointments in the Technion Administration

The Technion has announced four new appointments to its senior administration

Prof. Danny Raz – Senior Executive Vice President

Prof. Danny Raz, outgoing dean of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, has been appointed Senior Executive Vice President of the Technion. Prof. Raz specializes in the management and optimization of communication and cloud networks. He holds bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, physics, and computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1996. He served as a visiting lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and as a researcher at Bell Labs before joining the Technion’s Faculty of Computer Science in 2000. Prof. Raz has served as a consultant to leading companies in Israel and abroad, was a visiting scientist at Google California in 2007, and in 2015 established the first Bell Labs branch in Israel. He is a recipient of the Yanai Prize for Excellence in Academic Education.

Prof. Oded Rabinovitch – Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

Prof. Oded Rabinovitch, holder of the Abel Wolman Chair in the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been appointed Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs after serving since October 2019 as Senior Executive Vice President of the Technion. He earned his B.Sc. in civil engineering with high distinction and his Ph.D. through the Technion’s special track. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Delaware, he joined the Technion faculty in 2002. From 2014 to 2019, he served as Dean of the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He has received numerous awards for teaching excellence, including the Yanai Prize for Excellence in Academic Education (2012), and has been named an Outstanding Lecturer every year since 2017. His research focuses on layered and composite structures, particularly failure processes in such structures, the dynamics of interlayer failures, random characteristics of these processes, and the interaction among topology, rate, and stability of interlayer mechanisms in applications ranging from structural reinforcement with composite materials to layered systems in orthodontics.

Prof. Lihi Zelnik-Manor – Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development
Prof. Lihi Zelnik-Manor of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been appointed Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development. She earned her B.Sc. in mechanical engineering from the Technion. After graduation, she joined the high-tech industry, later completing her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, followed by postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She joined the Technion faculty in 2007. Between 2014 and 2016, she served as a visiting professor at Cornell Tech, and from 2018 to 2021, she headed Alibaba Group’s R&D center in Israel. She serves on the executive boards of the Computer Vision Foundation and the European Computer Vision Association. Her research interests include computer vision, machine learning, and the development of innovative technologies for digitizing the sense of touch—groundbreaking technologies that enable the perception of virtual objects and the tactile experience of distant ones.

Prof. Yuval Garini – Executive Vice President for Innovation and Industry Relations
Prof. Yuval Garini of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering has been appointed Executive Vice President for Innovation and Industry Relations. He is a graduate of the Technion’s Faculty of Physics and a co-founder of a company specializing in advanced medical instrumentation. After a period at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, he joined the Department of Physics at Bar-Ilan University, where he served as head of the Institute of Nanotechnology, which he helped develop and advance. He returned to the Technion in 2020 as head of the Biophysics and Nano-Dynamics Laboratory in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering. His research focuses on developing and applying biophysics – and nanotechnology-based methods, designing systems for cancer diagnosis and targeted drug delivery, and studying the mechanisms of the living cell nucleus. He is active in Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE) and its Planning and Budgeting Committee (PBC), where he chairs several committees and maintains close ties with universities and companies in Israel and worldwide.

Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan congratulated the appointees and wished them great success in their new roles. He also expressed his gratitude to Prof. Naama Brenner, who served as Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, for her leadership and dedication during a particularly challenging period.

Photo credit: Rami Shlush, Technion Spokesperson’s Office