Author: shelleys

In recent years, meteoric progress has been made in the world of deep learning, but at the present time, there are virtually no medical products on the shelf that use this technology. Consequently, doctors continue to employ the same tools used in previous decades.

To find a solution to this problem, the research group of Professor Yael Yaniv of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering joined forces with the research groups of Professors Alex Bronstein and Assaf Schuster of the Taub Faculty of Computer Science. Now, under their joint supervision, research by doctoral students Yonatan Elul and Aviv Rosenberg has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). In the article, the authors demonstrate an AI-based system that automatically detects disease on the basis of hundreds of electrocardiograms, which are currently the most widespread technology employed for the diagnosis of cardiac pathology.

The new system automatically analyzes the electrocardiograms (ECGs) using augmented neural networks – the most prominent tool in deep learning today. These networks learn different patterns by training on a large number of samples, and the system developed by the researchers was trained on more than 1.5 million ECG segments sampled from hundreds of patients in hospitals in different countries.

The electrocardiogram, developed more than a century ago, provides important information on conditions affecting the heart, and does so quickly and non-invasively. The problem is that the printouts are presently interpreted by a human cardiologist, and thus, their interpretation is, by necessity, pervaded by subjective elements. As a result, numerous research groups worldwide are working on the development of systems that will automatically interpret the printouts efficiently and accurately. Moreover, these systems are able to identify pathological conditions that human cardiologists, regardless of their experience, will not be able to detect.

The system developed by the Technion researchers was built according to requirements defined by cardiologists, and its output includes an uncertainty estimation of the results, indication of suspicious areas on the ECG wave, and alerts regarding inconclusive results and increased risk of pathology not observed in the ECG signal itself. The system demonstrates sufficient sensitivity in providing alerts regarding patients at risk of arrhythmia even when the arrhythmia is not demonstrated in the ECG printout, and the rate of false alarms is negligible. Moreover, the new system explains its decisions using the accepted cardiology terminology.

The researchers hope this system can be used for cross-population scanning for the early detection of those who are at risk of arrhythmia. Without this early diagnosis, these people have an increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

The study was headed by Prof. Yael Yaniv, director of the Bioelectric and Bio-energetic Systems Laboratory at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion; Prof. Alex Bronstein, director of the VISTA Laboratory at the Taub Faculty of Computer Science; Prof. Assaf Schuster of the Learning at Scale Laboratory (MLL) at the Taub Faculty of Computer Science and co-director of the MLIS Center (Machine Learning & Intelligent Systems); Yonatan Elul, a doctoral student in the laboratories of Professors Bronstein, Yaniv, and Schuster who completed his bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering and his master’s degree at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion; and Aviv Rosenberg, a doctoral student in the laboratory of Professors Bronstein and Yaniv who completed his B.Sc. at the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering and his M.Sc. at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering.

The project was sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Technion Hiroshi Fujiwara Cyber Security Research Center and the Israel Cyber Directorate.

Click here for the article in PNAS

The journal Advanced Materials has reported on the success of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology researchers in creating conductors that are relevant to solar energy generation, biomedical engineering, and more using by-products of the food industry that would otherwise be discarded as waste. The technology demonstrated in the article allows for the simple, fast, cost effective, and environmentally friendly production of biopolymers, which include application for electrophysiological signal sensing.

The study was conducted in the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry under the leadership of Assistant Professor Nadav Amdursky, Head of the Biopolymers and Bioelectronics Laboratory, and doctoral students Ramesh Nandi and Yuval Agam. According to Prof. Amdursky, “The current global green trend has not bypassed industry, and numerous groups worldwide are working on new solutions that will limit the pollution caused by the production of synthetic materials and by their very presence. One of the options is, of course, the use of natural materials, and the big challenge is to adapt them to meet needs.”

The two main approaches in environmentally conscious chemistry are environmental chemistry – the creation of environmentally friendly materials; and sustainable chemistry – production based on available degradable materials and energy-efficient processes. The present research integrates the two approaches in an environmentally friendly production process that yields environmentally friendly products in the context of conductive polymers.

Polymers are long chains made up of thousands of building blocks called monomers. Silk, wool and cotton fibers are examples of natural polymers, whereas nylon and PVC are synthetic polymers. Conductive polymers are a subgroup of polymers, and they serve for a vast variety of applications: electronics, energy storage, fuel cells, medicine, and others. These polymers are currently produced using processes that are costly and cause pollution due to the use of derivatives of oil, gas, and fossil fuel.

The alternative proposed by the Technion research team is protein polymers – molecules that are present in different biological tissues such as silk and wool fibers, spider webs, hair, and nails. Here, as mentioned, they are by-products of the food industry that would otherwise be discarded as waste. According to Prof. Amdursky, “The inspiration to use proteins to create conductive polymers originated in the unique function of proteins in nature – they are exclusively responsible for transporting various charge carriers in flora and fauna; for example, in cellular respiration or in photosynthesis in plants.”

The researchers created transparent polymer films with high conductivity. This film is suitable for biological and biomedical applications since it is non-toxic. It is biodegradable in the human body, and can be stretched to approximately 400% of its original length, without significantly impairing its electrical properties. Its conductivity is among the highest detected in biological materials.

According to Prof. Amdursky, “The production of the film in our research was a one-pot process, spontaneous, inexpensive, fast, energy efficient, and nonpolluting. In the article, we demonstrate the use of the film as ‘artificial skin’ that noninvasively monitors electrophysiological signals. These signals play a meaningful part in brain and muscle activity, and therefore their external monitoring is a highly important challenge.”

Prof. Amdursky emphasizes that since this technology is designed for application and commercialization, “the economic consideration is key, and consequently, it is most important to lower the costs of production processes so that they will yield a product that is competitive, also in terms of price, with petroleum-based polymers, and happily, we have succeeded. This is in addition to the reduction in environmental damage in the production phase as well as during use. The new polymer is fully biodegradable in less than 48 hours, as opposed to synthetic polymers, which are not biodegradable and as result, pollute our planet.”

The research was sponsored by the Gutwirth Fund (Ramesh Nandi was awarded a scholarship), the United States – Israel Binational Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and a PhosAgro/UNESCO/IUPAC green chemistry research grant. The researchers thank the Nancy and Stephen Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP) for its financial support through the NEVET program, and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI) for the use of the Institute’s research infrastructure.

Click here for the paper in Advanced Materials.

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Joint research by the Technion and KSM, Maccabi Health Services’ Research and Innovation Center, has demonstrated that the rapid and extensive vaccination of Israel’s adult population against COVID-19 provided highly substantial protection for the adolescent public – 16 year-olds and younger – who were not eligible to receive the shots until recently. The study, based on an analysis of 1.37 million vaccinated individuals from 246 different communities in Israel, has identified a significant negative association between the vaccination rate in a given area and infection among the unvaccinated (true infection rate) at those young ages, who were not eligible for the vaccination until recently.

The study, which was published in Nature Medicine, garnered worldwide attention, including coverage in the New York Times. The research project was headed by the Technion’s Prof. Roy Kishony, Dr. Idan Yelin, and student Oren Milman of the Faculty of Biology and the Lorry I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering, in collaboration with experts from KSM (the Kahn-Sagol-Maccabi Research and Innovation Center) headed by Dr. Tal Patalon.

The present study continues and further strengthens the findings of a previous study by the Technion and KSM, which was also published in Nature Medicine. The earlier study demonstrated that the vaccination substantially decreases the viral load after inoculation, and therefore lowers the vaccinated individual’s “personal reproduction number,” i.e. his chances of infecting others. According to Prof. Kishony, “We have now found that those findings are correct, not only on the individual level, but also with regard to the population as a whole. The mass vaccination of the adult Israeli population lowered the reproduction number, and thus substantially protected the infant, child and up to 16-year-old adolescent population, who were not eligible for the vaccination until recently.”

The vaccination rollout in Israel began on December 19, 2020, and within nine weeks almost half the population had received the BNT162b vaccine from Pfizer–BioNTech. The rapid and extensive rollout, which was not uniform everywhere in the country, provided a rare opportunity to examine the effect of vaccination in each community on the community as a whole. The close collaboration between the Technion and Maccabi also enabled the researchers to perform an advanced statistical analysis of a large public – 1.37 million members of Maccabi Healthcare Services, who were vaccinated between December 6, 2020 and March 9, 2021. The data used by the Technion researchers were, of course, anonymous, meaning that they did not include any information on the patient’s identity.

The study was carried out on the basis of a geographic segmentation of the country, in which 246 communities from different geographic regions in Israel were defined. This segmentation was designed to test the association between the vaccination rate at the community level in a particular area and the level of infection among the young population (age 16 and less). As mentioned, the article identifies a robust negative association between the vaccination rate and the risk of infection for unvaccinated members of the community in question.

The study was sponsored by a grant from the KillCorona research grant program. Coordinated by the Israel Science Foundation, the program was established one year ago to encourage research to help flatten the COVID-19 curve.

A study conducted in the Technion Faculty of Biology sheds light on the structure and dynamics of chromatosomes. Published in the journal Molecular Cell, the study was conducted by Dr. Sergei Rudnizky under the supervision of Professors Ariel Kaplan and Philippa Melamed.

Each one of the cells in our body contains DNA, which provides the instructions required for our development and function. Astoundingly, a total of two meters of DNA is packaged in each cell’s nucleus, just tens of microns in size, a feat accomplished by packaging the DNA into a compact structure called chromatin. The basic level of chromatin organization is provided by wrapping the DNA around proteins called histones in a spool-like structure that resembles “beads on a string.” Then, more complex structures called chromatosomes are formed with the help of a special histone, known as a “linker histone,” which connects the “strings.”

Packaging of the genome is essential in order for it to fit into the cell, but it also reduces the accessibility to the cellular machines that read the DNA and transcribe the genes. Thus, the distinct packaging at a particular gene will have a huge impact on its expression, in ways that are only beginning to be unraveled. In particular, linker histones are known to play a key role in this organization of the genome, and their malfunctions can lead to serious diseases including cancer and autism, but the most basic questions of how they bind DNA are still unanswered.

The lack of understanding of these crucial processes stems from the dynamic nature of linker histones, which makes it challenging to investigate them using conventional methods based on sampling a huge number of molecules simultaneously. In order to overcome this problem, Prof. Kaplan’s lab developed a unique method based on “optical tweezers,” an approach that allows researchers to capture individual chromatin molecules and exert forces on them with the help of a focused laser beam. In these experiments, one strand of DNA is slowly detached from its complementary strand in a manner similar to a zipper being unzipped, through the entire structure of a chromatosome. The principle of the measurement is simple: at points where a histone makes contact with the DNA, even in the weakest way, the zipper gets stuck, and more force needs to be applied to overcome the histone-DNA contact and advance into the structure.

Using this approach, Dr. Rudnizky and his coworkers discovered that contacts between histones and DNA are far more extensive than previously known, and that chromatosomes are, in fact, much larger than previously thought. Moreover, they found a surprising flexibility in the structure of linker histones, as two different chromatosome shapes exist: one symmetric and compact, and the second asymmetric and more relaxed. Remarkably, transition between these shapes in an individual molecule can be externally controlled by the transcription machinery itself. This suggests that the cell utilizes the transition between stable and unstable forms of a chromatosome to regulate access to the DNA in a controlled manner. Given the key role played by chromatosomes in maintaining proper expression of our genome, these findings add an important layer to our understanding of the role of chromatin architecture in health and disease.

For the article in Molecular Cell, click here.

Over the years, the Technion has established itself as a leading academic institution in AI. It is currently ranked 15th in the world, with 100 faculty members engaged in areas across the AI spectrum.

The Technion’s efforts to advance the field of artificial intelligence have positioned it among the world’s leaders in AI research and development. CSRankings, the leading metrics-based ranking of top computer science institutions around the world, has ranked the Technion #1 in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe (and of course, in Israel), and 15th worldwide. In the subfield of machine learning, the Technion is ranked 11th worldwide. The data used to compile the rankings is from 2016 to 2021.

One of the innovations that is part of the framework of the Technion’s AI prowess is the Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems (MLIS) research center, which aggregates all AI-related activities.

Today, 46 Technion researchers are engaged in core AI research areas, and more than 100 researchers are in AI-related fields: health and medicine, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, industrial robotics, cybersecurity, natural language processing, FinTech, human-machine interaction, and others. Two leading AI researchers co-direct MLIS: Professor Shie Mannor of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor Assaf Schuster of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science.

According to Prof. Mannor, “for years, the Technion has maintained its position as the leading research institute in Israel and Europe in core AI areas. The Technion has a unique ecosystem that includes tens of researchers from various faculties, research centers, and a number of undergraduate and graduate programs in the field.”

“All fields of science, technology, and engineering at the Technion have been upgraded in recent years, applying Technion knowledge in AI fields,” said Prof. Schuster, “Most include components based on information processing and machine learning. Furthermore, the Technion views the dissemination of its acquired knowledge as a mission of national importance for commercial sector. In that regard, the Technion operates in close cooperation with the technology sector in Northern Israel and within its partnership with the prestigious EuroTech Universities Alliance. These partnerships in Israel and worldwide link AI research at the Technion to the vanguard of activity in this field.”

The MLIS center strives toward four main goals: (1) establishing the Technion as a top-5 university in the field of AI worldwide; (2) pooling resources, recruiting researchers, and students from all Technion departments to advance and conduct joint research in the field; (3) connecting Technion researchers with relevant parties in the industry, especially technology companies and other organizations that generate Big Data; (4) Establishing close research collaboration with other prominent research institutes in the AI field in Israel and worldwide.

In May 2021, the Technion entered a long-term collaboration with American software giant PTC, under which the company will transfer its Haifa research campus to the Technion, to advance joint research in AI and manufacturing technology. PTC joins several other organizations that collaborate with the Technion in these fields, among them the technological universities of Lausanne (Switzerland), Eindhoven (Netherlands), Munich (Germany), and the Paris Polytechnique (France) in Europe, as well as Cornell Tech, home of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Waterloo University, and Carnegie Mellon University, which operates the largest center for AI and robotics in the United States.

In what can be regarded as a significant breakthrough, researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, together with their overseas partners, present novel technologies aimed at decoding the protein profile of single cells. A perspective paper, detailing the international group’s latest methods developments in the area, was recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Methods.

Identifying the genetic profile of single cells has important value to both research and practical application, and achievements in this field can help understand the great variability between different cells. However, unlike successes in studying the genetic profile of a single cell, decoding the protein profile of a single cell has yet to be realized. This would be a significant milestone, from both research and clinical perspectives, since an accurate sensing of proteins levels can help diagnosing diseases at an early stage when their levels are too low to be detected by current tests. For example, such mapping may help in distinguishing among different tumors and enable treatment to be optimally tailored to the specific case.

The collaborative manuscript presented here was led by Professor. Chirlmin Joo (Delft University), Dr. Javier Alfaro (University of Gdansk), and Professor. Amit Meller of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering (Technion), after a successful international conference SMPS19 (Single-Molecule Proteins Sequencing), a successful international conference organized by Prof. Meller and held in Jerusalem in 2019.

In the paper, the researchers describe the future technologies of protein sequencing and identification on the individual molecular level, alongside innovations in existing methods such as mass spectrometry. One such example is technology developed in Prof. Meller’s laboratory at the Technion, involving nanometric sensors that include nano-channels and nano-pores to allow the direct sensing of individual proteins (see illustration).

The proteins are labelled with fluorescent dyes, and as they flow through the sensor, a sophisticated optical system can read the markers. The optical signal is processed and analyzed using a deep learning-based system – which has also been developed in the lab – enabling the protein to be identified. This, and other such technologies will lead to a deeper understanding of biological processes and the development of highly sensitive medical tests that will enable the early diagnosis of a variety of diseases.

The Technion study led by Prof. Amit Meller also included a postdoctoral fellow Dr. Xander van Kooten and a Ph.D. student Shilo Ohayon, in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering. The study has been supported by the European Union (the ERC Grant from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program for EU research), the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF), and the Azrieli Fellowship Program.

Among the 241 new MDs who received their Technion diplomas this past June, visually impaired Dr. Keren Amiel stands out for overcoming unusual challenges.

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, ever since I was a child,” Dr. Amiel says. “I knew it was going to be a challenge, so initially I was apprehensive, but I decided to try.”

Amiel suffers from congenital nystagmus, a condition she inherited from her father which causes her eyes to “dance” uncontrollably, resulting in significant visual impairment.

Last month, 241 Technion graduates of the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine received their Doctor of Medicine diplomas. Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan spoke at the graduation ceremony; the daughters of Ruth and Bruce, Dr. Vered Drenger-Rappaport and Ms. Irith Rappaport, congratulated the new doctors. For half of them, the ceremony comes two years after their graduation, as no ceremonies were held at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For Dr. Amiel, the apprehensions were over when she finally held her MD diploma. Not only that, but over the past year, she completed her internship at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, and started residency in child and adolescent psychiatry at Schneider Children’s Medical Center.

Excelling while thinking outside the box 

The chief challenge, Amiel says, was being the first, blazing the trail. “The faculty was very supportive and willing to make the necessary adjustments,” she says. “But we had to figure out together what these adjustments were – identify the problems, and figure out how to overcome them. It took some out-of-the-box thinking.”

For example, in anatomy classes, where one has to recognize structures in the human body, she used surgical loupes like surgeons use when performing delicate operations. On one thing she agreed with the faculty from the start: in no way would her education be compromised; there would be no lowering the bar.

“The Technion encourages one to excel,” she says. “It poses a challenge, and an opportunity to learn from the very best. That’s why I wanted to study here.”

Currently, in her work with young patients, Dr. Amiel’s disability offers an unexpected advantage: it helps her to connect with patients. A doctor can be quite intimidating, but a doctor who is also a human being – less so. “I often ask children what they want to be when they grow up,” Dr. Amiel says. “If a child is afraid he or she won’t be able to achieve their dreams, I can encourage them through telling them about the challenges I’ve overcome.”

Paving the way for more people with disabilities 

Commenting on integration of people with disabilities, Dr. Amiel says: “I think visibility is important. The first time my colleagues in the hospital saw me with my nose glued to the computer screen, I suppose it looked weird. But the more common it is, the less weird it becomes, and that opens the way for more people with disabilities.”

While Dr. Amiel is the first visually impaired doctor in Israel, a few have passed this hurdle previously around the world. The first was Jacob Bolotin, who graduated from the Chicago Medical School in 1912. In more recent times, David Hartman earned his medical degree at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1975, followed by Tim Cordes graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005. The knowledge that she might be the first in Israel, but others around the world have succeeded before her, helped Amiel persevere, and find the way to achieve the goal she has set for herself.

Story by Tatyana Haykin

Being afraid of math prevents people from engaging with it when they need it – even if they learned it at school, a new study claims.

Since COVID-19 emerged as a global crisis, the news has been dominated by graphs and terms like “R numbers” and “exponential growth,” referring to the rate of spread of the disease. To what extent does the average adult understand the quantitative information appearing in the news? The results of a new study paint a gloomy picture: When asked about “math in the news” items presented to them, even people who had taken advanced mathematics classes in high school did not typically figure everything out, but obtained only an average “grade” of 72/100. But these advanced learners make up a small minority of high school graduates. Those who took only the mandatory level of high school math – as over 50% of high school graduates with official Israeli matriculation certificates tend to do – correctly interpreted much fewer items on average (54/100).

Results were even more troubling for participants who had not passed all the examinations required for the official state certificate. Participants in this group obtained an average “grade” of 44/100 – suggesting they didn’t understand over half of the items in the questionnaire. This latter group represents about 45% of the total cohort of 17-year-olds in Israel in recent years. These findings raise concern about the relevance of school mathematics to the real-life needs of most learners and call attention to the importance of providing all learners with mathematics literacy.

The findings emerged from a new study on mathematical media literacy among a representative sample of 439 Israeli adults. The study was conducted by a team of researchers at the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology during the first wave of COVID-19 cases in Israel (March-April 2020). The team was led by Profs. Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim, Ayelet Baram-Tsabari and Aviv J. Sharon.

The researchers were surprised to find a factor that appears to be even more strongly associated with the participants’ understanding of mathematical information in the news than the level of math they had taken at school: the participants’ self-perceptions as being “good at math” and the extent they find mathematics useful and interesting. This finding suggests that being afraid of math prevents people from engaging with it when they need it – even if they had learned it at school.

“These results seem to show that school mathematics, especially in its high levels, may prepare adults to understand critical information important for their well-being, such as at a time of global pandemic. However, they also indicate that negative attitudes towards math may significantly hinder adults’ engagement with such information,” said the study’s lead author, Prof. Heyd-Metzuyanim. “Our findings should trigger some soul-searching in the mathematics education field,” she added. “After all, the goal of learning mathematics, for most of the public, is to be able to deal with mathematical information in their daily lives. We should therefore make sure that high-school graduates leave school with both the cognitive tools for processing mathematical information around them, and the attitudes and dispositions that would allow them to do so.”

Click here for the paper in Educational Studies in Mathematics

Professor Emeritus Yeshayahu (Ishi) Talmon of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering has been inducted into the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Prof. Talmon completed his B.Sc. (summa cum laude) and M.Sc. in the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Technion, attained his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and in 1979 returned to his home faculty at the Technion, this time as a faculty member. Between the years 2013-2019, he served as a member of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education. He has won prestigious awards and titles, including the Overbeek Gold Medal, an Honorary Doctorate from Lund University in Sweden, and an honorary membership at the Israeli Society for Microscopy and the Israeli Society of Chemical Engineering.

Prof. Talmon studies nanometric structures of synthetic and biological complex fluids, developing cryogenic electron microscopy methods (Cryo-EM), the interaction between polymers and surface-active materials, and more.

Upon his appointment, Prof. Talmon became one of nine Technion faculty members who are members of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The acceptance of the seven new members of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities was approved at the general assembly of the Academy on June 15, and the official appointment ceremony will be held at the end of 2021.

The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities was chartered by law in 1961 to bring together the best scientists and researchers, in order to foster and promote science in Israel. In order to fulfill its purpose, it advises the government on activities relating to research and scientific planning of national significance, publishes articles that advance science and scholarship, and maintains active contact with the international scientific community.

Congratulations, Prof. Talmon!

Indian Ambassador to Israel Sanjeev Singla visited the Technion yesterday to discuss possible scientific collaborations. Singla, along with First Secretary Mayuri Rahkhee, met with Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan and Indian students attending the Technion.

Singla expressed his hopes to deepen academic ties by further increasing the number of Indian students at the Technion (from approximately 100). He was pleased to hear about the ongoing collaboration in physics between Technion and various Indian universities.

Prof. Sivan, along with Prof. Alon Wolf, Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development, and Prof. Jacob (Koby) Rubinstein, Executive Vice President for Research, welcomed the ambassador and expressed the importance of further strengthening the ties with India.

The Indian Ambassador also met with several Indian students and post-doctoral researchers, who told him about their experiences on campus, and gave ideas about how to help spread the word and promote the Technion among the post-doc community back in India. In attendance were Kaushalendra Patel and Rahul Suresh, Ph.D. students from the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry; researcher Sruthi Sekar and postdoctoral student Sumana Kundu of the Faculty of Materials Engineering; Marketing Manager Hadas Shafir presented Technion International.

The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology last week signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Romania’s Politehnica University of Bucharest, establishing collaboration between the two academic institutions. The MOU will support educational and scientific cooperation, as well as promote student exchange.

Prof. Alon Wolf, Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development, who signed the MOU on behalf of Technion, was part of an Israeli delegation led by President Reuven Rivlin, focusing on strengthening economic and academic ties, including collaborative projects in the fields of smart cities, health and agritech.

Politehnica University of Bucharest, which was established 200 years ago, is home to a prestigious engineering school, with over 25,000 students. According to Prof. Wolf, a researcher from the Technion’s Mechanical Engineering Faculty, Politehnica University, much like the Technion, is a beacon of technical excellence, which boasts a cadre of leading alumni in the field of engineering.

Politehnica University Rector Prof. Mihnea Costoiu said: “We have signed a cooperation agreement with Technion, through which we aim to develop courses in areas such as digital health, medical technologies, as well as promote student exchange, internships, opportunities for researchers, and development of joint research projects.”

This MOU comes on the heels of an agreement the Technion recently signed with Brazil’s Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, one of Latin America’s largest hospitals, which will support student exchange, collaborative research, and clinical trials.

The ambassadors and heads of mission of a dozen Latin American states, including Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, visited the Technion June 9 to hear about its scientific discoveries, contribution to the fight against coronavirus, its Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, and more.

The delegation also visited the laboratory of Prof. Benjamin Podbilewicz (originally from Mexico), and heard about the research of postdoctoral fellow Dr. Nicolas Brukman, who is from Argentina.

Prof. Podbilewicz’s laboratory studies cell fusion, and the focus of Dr. Nicolas Brukman’s study is the fusion of sperm and egg cells. He presented the study – which could have far-reaching implications on both contraceptives and infertility treatments – to the Latin American delegation, which toured his lab, located at the Emerson Family Life Sciences Building. The ambassadors were also interested in student exchange opportunities.

Among the ambassadors were Margarita Eliana Manjarrez Herrera (Colombia), Carlos Daniel Chavez-Taffur Schmidt (Peru), Sergio Daniel Urribarri (Argentina), Adis Arlene Urieta (Panama), and Julissa Anzueto Aguilar (Guatemala). Last month, Technion President Prof. Uri Sivan hosted Gerson Menandro Garcia De Freitas, the Brazilian Ambassador to Israel, who toured the campus.

“Technion is well positioned to develop solutions to the world’s most pressing needs”

Gil Lainer, Director, Division of Public Affairs and Resource Development, welcomed the delegation to the Technion. “We have strong ties with Latin America, and always look to further collaborate,” he said. “The challenges of the 21^st century are global, and the Technion is well positioned to develop solutions to the world’s most pressing needs.”

Most recently, the Technion signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which will support student exchange, clinical trials, and collaborative research projects between the two institutions.

Text by Tatyana Haykin