The Hubble Space Telescope: A Quarter Century of Science
Wednesday 13 July, 2016 7.30pm to 9pm Churchill Auditorium Open to public upon registration
Distinguished Lecture by: Jeff Hoffman (NASA Astronaut, MIT Professor)
The Hubble Space Telescope has become one of the most extraordinary and beloved instruments in the history of space science, and has provided some of the most memorable images of the cosmos. But the telescope was not an immediate success – without the work performed by the STS-61 crew, including astronomer and NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman, the Hubble could have been a scientific disaster.
Dr. Hoffman will recall his shuttle missions and his experience as a space telescope “repair man”, and how those repairs have led to the telescope becoming one of the most significant science instruments ever built.
The Space Studies Program will be held at the Technion from July 12th to September 1st, 2016. The program will include a guest lecture by Dr. Buzz Aldrin, one of the 12 humans to walk on the moon, and one of the strongest advocates for human travel to Mars.
In addition, several public events will be held during the program, including: Israel in Space panel, International Astronaut panel, an evening lecture by astronaut Professor Jeff Hoffman, and a panel about the human side of the Columbia mission, and more.
All events will be held in English. Registration is required.
New Technique Could Improve Angular Resolution of Telescopes Beyond the Diffraction Limit
The angular resolution of any optical imaging system, from cameras and microscopes to telescopes, is fundamentally constrained by diffraction, the bending of light waves around obstacles in their path
Prof. Erez N. Ribak
The angular resolution of a telescope is the smallest angle between two objects that still can be resolved as separate things; in a telescope with high angular resolution, those objects can be very close together and yet still appear distinct.
In a new paper published in the journal Optics Letters, from The Optical Society (OSA), a research team now proposes a way around the diffraction limit of telescopes—one that could potentially enable even moderately sized telescopes to obtain images with very high angular resolution.
The usable angular resolution of ground-based telescopes can be increased using adaptive objects (AO) systems, which compensate in real-time for the blurring effects of Earth’s atmosphere and ideally restore imagery to diffraction-limited resolution. However, says adaptive optics expert Aglaé N. Kellerer, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, as telescope sizes increase, the correction becomes increasingly more complex. “In 1989, the first astronomical prototype had 19 correction elements and a 150-hertz sampling rate. Current systems have several thousand correction elements and sampling rates above 1000 Hz—and this is not the end of the line,” says Kellerer.
Kellerer and her co-author Erez N. Ribak, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Israel, now propose that it may be possible to improve the angular resolution of a telescope beyond the diffraction limit, using a combination of photon amplification and the statistical properties of stimulated photons versus spontaneous photons.
Consider a photon emitted by an astronomical object. Before the photon is actually detected by a given telescope, all that is known of its location is that it exists at some point on an immense spherical wave centered on the astronomical object and extending all the way to the telescope. Once the telescope’s detector records the photon, however, the photon’s pathway is narrowed to within an area constrained by the telescope’s aperture. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle indicates that because the path of the photon is now better known, the corresponding uncertainty in its momentum must increase. This limits the resolution of the telescope.
However, say Kellerer and Ribak, this limit applies only to independent photons; with sets of coherent or entangled photons, the limit can be smaller. And that is key to their idea. “We propose to use photon amplification—stimulated emission—to overcome the diffraction limit in astronomy,” she says.
Specifically, the researchers propose that excited atoms could be placed between the telescope aperture and its photon detector. When an astronomical photon enters the telescope, it will stimulate the emission of identical photons. “These photons arrive simultaneously on the detector and spread over the diffraction pattern,” Kellerer explains. “If the incoming photon stimulates the emission of 100 photons, the precision on the determination of the photon’s incoming direction is improved by a factor of 10.”
The stimulated emission would be accompanied by spontaneous emission that contributes noise. For that reason, scientists previously had discarded the idea of using photon amplification to improve astronomical imaging. Kellerer and Ribak, however, suggest using only stimulated photon bursts that are above a particular size. Astronomical photons that generate small photon bursts have a larger noise component and are discarded, reducing the overall noise. “This might allow us to overcome the diffraction limit,” she says.
One potential downside of the proposed technique is a loss of sensitivity in the images produced. “It is a price to pay,” she admits, “but it is reassuring: if we found a means to overcome the diffraction limit at no cost, we would be in contradiction with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and we would thus certainly be wrong.” (In addition, she notes, the loss of sensitivity can partly be overcome by increased exposure times.)
Achieving extremely high angular resolution would be beneficial for many astronomical applications, Kellerer says. As one example, she points to recent research by her group that led to the discovery of Earth-like planets around an ultra-cool dwarf star located 39 light years away. “Even though these planets are close by astronomical standards,” she says, “it will be extremely difficult to build telescopes that are sufficiently large, or interferometers that have a sufficiently long baseline, to image their surfaces. This will require a technological breakthrough.”
Technology developed at the Technion may replace silicon chips in the world of electronics. The development is being published in the journal Nature Communications
Since their discovery, CNTs (Carbon Nanotubes) have fascinated many researchers due to their unprecedented electrical, optical, thermal and mechanical properties and their chemical sensitivity. These tubes are considered a promising component of future electronics. Recently, a complete computer based on CNT circuits has been demonstrated, and in the future they may be able to replace the silicon chip as the building block of electronics.
One of the biggest challenges on the way to the implementation of CNTs involves the need to produce them in specific locations on a smooth substrate, in conditions that will lead to the formation of a circuit around them. An article published in the journal Nature Communications presents a breakthrough in this regard, achieved in the laboratory of Prof. Yuval Yaish of the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Zisapel Nanoelectronics Center at Technion. The technology developed by Prof. Yaish creates the said conditions and moreover, also makes it possible to study the dynamic properties of CNTs, including acceleration, resonance (vibration) and the transition from softness to hardness.
Due to the nanometer size of the CNTs (100,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair) it is extremely difficult to find or locate them at specific locations. Together with graduate student Gilad Zeevi and doctoral student Michael Shlafman, Prof. Yaish developed a simple, rapid, non-invasive, and scalable technique that enables optical imaging of CNTs. Instead of relying on the CNT chemical properties to bind marker molecules, the researchers relied on the fact that the CNT is both a chemical and physical defect on the otherwise flat and uniform surface. It can serve as a seed for the nucleation and growth of small size, optically visible, nano-crystals, which can be seen and studied using a conventional optical microscope (as opposed to CNTs, which are too small). As the CNT surface is not used to bind the molecules, they can be removed completely after imaging, leaving the surface intact. Thus the CNT’s electrical and mechanical properties are preserved.
“The integrated circuit, the chip, is the biggest breakthrough in electronics so far,” explains Prof. Yaish, “and we believe that the method we developed will serve as an applicable platform for the integration of nano-electronics with silicon technologies, and possibility even the replacement of these technologies in molecular electronics. The CNT is an amazing and very strong building block with remarkable electrical, mechanical and optical properties. Some of them are conductors and some are semiconductors, and therefore they are considered a future replacement for silicon. The unique infrastructures available at the Technion clean room facilities within the microelectronics center headed by Prof. Nir Tessler enable us not only to demonstrate this principle but also to produce world-class devices.”
According to Prof. Yaish, existing methods for the production of CNT are very slow and costly and result in a non-precision product and, in general, cannot be implemented in industry. “Our approach is the opposite of the norm. We grow the CNTs directly, and with the aid of the organic crystals that coat the CNTs we can see them under a microscope very quickly. Then image identification software finds the precise location of the CNTs, automatically designs the optimal electrical circuit and produces the device (transistor). This is the strategy. The goal is the integration of CNTs in an integrated circuit of miniaturized electronic components, mainly transistors, on a single chip (VLSI), which could, as stated, replace silicon electronics.”
Prof. Yuval Yaish earned his B.Sc. (cum laude) and M.Sc. (cum laude) in Physics from Tel Aviv University. He earned his Ph.D. – in Experimental Physics of Condensed Matter – at the Technion, under Prof. Uri Sivan. He did his postdoc in molecular electronics at Cornell University in the US.
A Technion study reveals a mechanism for accurate and individualized control of brain activity using ultrasonic waves: ultrasound’s waveform pattern dramatically affects interaction with neurons, and consequently, certain ultrasound patterns will have a different effect on different types of neurons.
Achieving artificial brain stimulation by accurate and non-invasive means is one of the key goals of contemporary brain research and treatment and a source of growing enthusiasm by the scientific community. A major success in this area is the excitation of neurons using ultrasound waves or ‘ultrasonic neuromodulation’. This approach may complement or even partially replace existing brain treatments, which require surgical insertion of electrodes through the skull and are therefore inherently more risky. The ability to affect nerve cells using ultrasound waves has been known for many years but has recently seen dramatic developments, including a demonstration of the ability to create artificial (phantom) sensations in human subjects by direct brain stimulation. However, since these are highly complex systems and phenomena, much is still unknown about them, particularly with regard to the mechanisms that enable activation and suppression of neural networks.
Prof. Shy Shoham (Left) and Prof. Eitan Kimmel
Exciting news in this area comes now from the Technion’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute, where new research conducted by Profs. Shy Shoham and Eitan Kimmel and PhD student Misha Plaksin could radically improve our understanding and ability to apply ultrasonic neuromodulation. In a study just published in the journal eNeuro, the Technion team puts forward a unifying new theoretical foundation that explains a wide range of experimental findings in the field. Their study surprisingly concludes that the ultrasound’s waveform pattern dramatically affects its interaction with neurons, and consequently certain ultrasound patterns will have a different effect on different types of neurons. The framework they introduce also makes it possible to predict the outcome of complex interactions in realistic brain neural networks which are composed of various types of neurons.
The study is based on NICE – a bio-physical model that the research group developed to explain the effect of ultrasound waves on brain cells. According to NICE, when the ultrasonic waves interact with a cell, the cellular membrane experiences nano-scale vibrations which lead to electrical charge accumulation on the membrane: the longer the vibrations continue, the more charge builds up in the membrane. Eventually, enough charge builds up so that an action potential is generated. The group now shows that when the ultrasonic wave is activated in short pulses, this will cause selective excitation of inhibitory cells, with the net result of suppression of the neural network activity. This is the first explanation for this suppression phenomenon, which was recently observed experimentally by researchers at Harvard University.
According to Prof. Shoham, “So far, we found a very nice agreement between the predictions of the NICE model and the results of experiments in the field. We have two important findings: further confirmation of the predictive power of the leading theory in the field, and a new ability to engineer ultrasound patterns that will specifically activate neuron populations – something that until now has only been possible using highly invasive means.”
The new study may lead to major breakthroughs in the field of non-invasive medical treatment of neurological diseases. “Right now, the brain is still something of a closed box,” says Prof. Shoham. “Ultrasound could help to pry open that box. Now, for example, for the first time at the Technion and in cooperation with InSightec Ltd. and Prof. Itamar Kahn of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, we are using functional MRI technology to examine the effect of ultrasound on brain activity, so that we can both excite and monitor it without recourse to electrodes and other invasive means.”
Technion mourns the passing of Dr. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and long-term friend of Technion and the State of Israel.
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in the town of Sighet, now part of Romania. During World War II, he was deported to the German concentration and extermination camps, where his parents and little sister perished. Elie and his two older sisters survived. Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, he was taken to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist. In 1956, he published his first book in Yiddish, Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Was Silent), which in 1958 became La Nuit (Night), a memoir of his experiences in the concentration camps. He has since authored many more books. Prof. Wiesel was the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in the Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University, and a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City College of New York.
Elie Wiesel was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize because “with his message and through his practical work in the cause of peace, [he] is a convincing spokesman for the view of mankind and for the unlimited humanitarianism which are at all times necessary for a lasting and just peace.” He was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Humanities at Boston University, a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy as well as the Department of Religion. In 2005, Prof. Wiesel was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Technion.
“Surely in this place you have shown that there is more to human spirit to celebrate than despair.” Elie Wiesel at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Elie Wiesel at Technion
“Celebrate life.” The message resounded loud and clear from one of humankind’s guardians of ethics on all levels, Elie Wiesel, as he stood to receive an honorary doctorate from the Technion in 2005.
Attracted to the Technion and its pioneering work in life science and technology, Wiesel was a close friend of fellow Nobel Laureate Technion Distinguished Professor Aaron Ciechanover.
Wiesel delivered several lectures to Technion students calling for an awakening of human sensitivity towards the challenges ahead. “There is no escape from learning. Study, study and study!” he said. Speaking of himself as a writer, he said: “The weight of a book is the weight of its silence, not the weight of its words. What separates one word from the other is to me a mystery as great as what separates one molecule from the other in science, or what separates one planet from the other”.
Asked what makes the Technion different from other academic institutes, his response was clear: “At the Technion it is different. Technion has a moral dimension, which you don’t find everywhere.”
On June 8, 2005 Prof. Elie Wiesel delivered the lecture “Why I Write” at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology at the closing of the annual Board of Governors meeting. Wiesel was introduced by Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, Technion Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. You can watch it below.
The Space Studies Program will be held at the Technion from July 12th to September 1st, 2016. The program will include a guest lecture by Dr. Buzz Aldrin, one of the 12 humans to walk on the moon, and one of the strongest advocates for human travel to Mars.
In addition, several public events will be held during the program, including: Israel in Space panel, International Astronaut panel, an evening lecture by astronaut Professor Jeff Hoffman, and a panel about the human side of the Columbia mission, and more.
All events will be held in English. Registration is required.
Study Highlights How Audiences React to Science on Different Social Media Platforms
No longer isolated in an ivory tower, scientific ideas, practices and findings are now increasingly communicated over various social media platforms. This raises questions about the nature of those platforms and the differences between them. For example, do people react to a scientific image posted on Twitter any differently than they would if they saw the same image on Facebook?
A new study conducted by CERN and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology suggests that similar scientific topics tend to receive similar rates of user engagement even though they are posted on different social media platforms. In particular, awe-inspiring images tend to attract high engagement irrespective of platform – and in some cases, even if these images are not newsworthy at all.
For example, a picture of a CERN dishwasher for circuit boards was viewed over 121,000 times on Facebook and retweeted over 1,200 times on Twitter, presumably because it was so surprising and funny. Indeed, it seems that the same principles that explain the allure of viral cat videos can apply to tweets about sub-atomic particles.
The study also found an unexpected difference between user engagement rates on different platforms. As one would expect, on platforms where CERN operated accounts with larger audiences, such as CERN’s English-language Twitter account, posts about scientific topics tended to receive more shares and clicks overall.
However, on average, on platforms where CERN had fewer followers, such as Instagram, each follower tended to be relatively more engaged. The results suggest that perhaps in new platforms, early adopters might tend to be more engaged followers.
The study, published last week in the scholarly journal PLOS ONE, explored how users engaged with posts about particle physics on different platforms of social media: Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram and Twitter. Also, the researchers examined the characteristics of the posts that tended to attract large numbers of user interactions.
To that purpose, the authors analyzed user interaction rates with nearly identical items which were cross-posted on five of CERN’s official social media accounts over an eight-week period in 2014. The researchers tracked a wide range of interactions, including number of “likes”, comments, shares, clicks on links, and time spent on CERN’s site.
The study was conducted by Kate Kahle from CERN along with Aviv Sharon and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. “To our knowledge, this study provides the first cross-platform characterization of public engagement with science on social media,” the researchers said. “Although the study focused on particle physics, its findings might serve to benchmark social media analytics in other areas of science as well.”
New discoveries about the development of the frontal midline around which the heart, lungs and digestive system are formed are being published in the journal Developmental Cell. The study was carried out by Professor Tom Schultheiss and doctoral student Alaa Arraf from the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine
Building the ventral midline. The midline is marked by the matrix protein laminin (red staining, white arrow). Cells (marked in green) migrate towards the midline but do not cross it
A study at the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine sheds light on the formation of the front of the body during embryonic development. In the study, published in the journal Developmental Cell, Professor Tom Schultheiss and doctoral student Alaa Arraf examined the factors responsible for the development of the frontal (abdominal) midline concurrently with the dorsal (rear) midline.
According to Professor Schultheiss, “in contrast to the dorsal midline and spinal column, whose aspects have been studied extensively, the process of development of the frontal midline is not clear. This is despite the importance of this line, on and around which the heart, navel, genitals, aorta, digestive system, sternum, bladder, liver, pancreas, lungs and more are formed.
“The development of the dorsal midline precedes the development of the frontal midline,” Arraf explains. “Therefore it is important for the frontal midline to develop in coordination with the dorsal midline. Disruption of this process causes a discrepancy between the back area and the abdominal area and may impair the development of organs such as the heart and lungs and even lead to death of the organism in some cases.”
Professor Tom Schultheiss (on the right) and doctoral student Alaa Arraf
In the current study, the researchers examined the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for the formation of the frontal midline in the early stages of embryonic development. One of the key factors controlling this process is the BMP (Bone Morphogentic Protein) gene. Arraf says: “It turns out that control of BMP from a central source (the notochord) enables precise coordination and timing in the formation of the frontal midline. Unbalanced expression of BMP will result in the shifting of the frontal midline, which can cause subsequent problems in the development of the internal organs in the abdomen and thorax.
The study published in Developmental Cell was carried out in conjunction with Andreas Kispert from the Institute of Molecular Biology at Hannover Medical School in Germany.
Professor Schultheiss’s lab is studying embryonic development, with an emphasis on the body’s initial organization and organ formation. “The practical purpose of these fields is to create tissue in the lab that can be used to repair damaged organs,” explains Professor Schultheiss.” To do this we must have a thorough understanding of tissue formation during the natural process of embryonic development. Therefore, we are investigating the formation of organs in the earliest stages, in which the embryonic cells acquire specific properties that are suitable for the target tissue (bone, skin, etc.), as well as the next stages in which the various cellular components combine to form a functioning organ.”
Technion Researchers Develop a Nanomedicine Technology for the Targeted Treatment of Gastric Tumors
A study conducted at the Technion, and published in the journal Oncotarget introduces innovative technology for future treatment of stomach cancer. The new treatment modality is based on a transport platform developed at the Technion using a combination of anti-cancer drugs and a chemoresistance reversal agent, which eliminates the tumor’s resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs.
It was developed as part of Maya Bar-Zeev’s doctoral dissertation at the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute, under the joint supervision of Prof. Yoav Livney of the Faculty of Biotechnology Engineering, and Prof. Yehuda Assaraf, Dean of the Faculty of Biology and Director of the Fred Wyszkowski Cancer Research Laboratory at the Technion.
The novel treatment will be administered orally and not intravenously, which implies that the cancer patient will be able to take the drug by himself at home. Furthermore, hospitalization is dangerous for immunocompromised cancer patients, due to drug-resistant pathogens widespread in hospitals.
Effective Packaging
The unique transport platform was developed at the laboratories of Prof. Livney and Prof. Assaraf, and essentially packages the drug in beta-casein. Caseins are the main proteins found in milk, in structures called micelles. The natural role of casein micelles is the transfer of calcium, phosphorus and protein from mother to the baby through breast milk. Beta-casein has a unique spatial structure providing it with two essential properties: the ability to encapsulate substances that are not water-soluble (i.e., hydrophobic compounds) and efficient digestion in the stomach.
Previous studies carried out in Prof. Livney’s lab first presented the potential of casein micelles for oral delivery of vitamins and drugs that are not water-soluble. A series of joint studies carried out with Prof. Assaraf examined beta-casein as a nanometric delivery vehicle for anti-cancer chemotherapy drugs. Since this platform effectively carries the drug to the stomach and releases it there, the researchers believe that it will be particularly effective in gastric diseases and gastric cancer in particular – one of the most aggressive and deadly types of cancer.
The current findings are based on a series of successful laboratory experiments and prove the system’s effectiveness in drug-resistant human gastric cancer cells. Now the research group is about to examine the system’s effectiveness in experiments on laboratory animals. According to the hypothesis, the combination of anti-cancer drugs and anti-resistance compounds on the innovative nanometric platform is expected to achieve a dramatic improvement in the treatment of stomach cancer, including in cells that have developed resistance to a broad spectrum of anti-cancer drugs.
Technion receives the Magen HaMiluim (Shield of the Reserves) Award
The Technion received the Shield of the Reserves Award on Monday. The award was granted by Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan and Chief Reserve Officer Brig. Gen. Hosea Friedman, at a ceremony paying tribute to the IDF’s reservists at the Kirya in Tel Aviv. The award, which is given to organizations and employers, is in recognition of the support for employees and college students serving in the reserves and in order to raise awareness of their contribution to society and to the country’s security.
“We are pleased and proud to receive the award,” said Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie. “Thousands of students who serve in the reserves attend the Technion, and the award is granted in recognition of the tremendous effort invested by the Technion in caring for its reservists and assisting them in routine and emergency situations. Moreover, for us it is first and foremost an expression of our gratitude to the thousands of Technion students who drop everything and present themselves for service when they receive their first call-up notice. This is the spirit and these are the values that we aspire to and inculcate at the Technion.”
The award was accepted on behalf of the Technion by David Orad, reserve coordinator at the TSA, the Technion Student Association. Orad is a third year student at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a reservist in the Israel Navy. He said: “The Technion and the TSA provide considerable assistance and benefits to students who are also reservists. Students come to the Technion to learn and succeed, and part of my job as reserve coordinator is to protect reservists through benefits that make life easier for them – textbooks, free photocopies, social benefits and more.” Orad added: “It makes us very proud to know that the Technion and the Student Association are receiving the award for taking care of reservists and giving them what they are entitled to and even more.”
Major (Ret.) Amit Gilboa, a third year student at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Transportation Infrastructure track, serves in the reserves as commander of an Armored Corps company in a battalion of the Harel Brigade. Gilboa, 30, completed his service in the IDF in 2012 after five years in the career army. During his studies, he participated in Operation Protective Edge, serving in the reserves for 35 days. “We received considerable support from the Technion and great understanding on the part of the professors and teaching assistants. The Technion, through the Unit for Student Advancement, helps reservists with make-up classes and make-up tests. As someone who still serves an average 30 days of reserve duty every year, I feel that the Technion has considerable sympathy and empathy for students serving in the reserves. The TSA also does a lot for the reservists, complementing the assistance that we receive from the Technion itself.
The benefits for reservists at the Technion include make-up tests, time extensions, exemption from homework, textbooks and free photocopies and even academic credits. The TSA, in collaboration with the Technion, also provides reservists with social benefits such as stand-up comedy shows and free tickets to the student festival.
Right to Left: Technion student, Amit Gilboa, Executive Vice President and Director General of the Technion, Matanyahu Englman, Chief Reserve Officer of the IDF, Brig. Gen. Hosea Friedman, Reserve Coordinator at the Technion Student Association, David Orad and Nimrod Harani, Vice Chairman of the Technion Student Association.
In acknowledgement of your significant contribution to the fields of psychiatry and mental health; in tribute to your public service and leadership in building understanding between peoples of all backgrounds; and for your support and friendship to the Jewish People, Israel, and Technion.
Prof. Jacques Lewiner
In recognition of your significant contributions to the field of physics; in tribute to your passion for innovation and your many patents; and with gratitude for your profound dedication to the State of Israel, Israeli academia, and the Technion.
Dov Moran
In recognition of your outstanding contributions to the growth of high-tech industry in Israel; in tribute to your groundbreaking inventions that strengthen Israel’s global position as a nation of innovation and creativity; and with gratitude for your inspirational support for young entrepreneurs and for being a role model to Technion alumni.
Ed Satell
In admiration of your tremendous vision, leadership, and enthusiastic support of the American Technion Society; with appreciation for your generous contributions to the advancement of the Technion; and in tribute to your dedication and commitment to the future of Israel.
Dr. David J. Skorton
In recognition of your exemplary leadership in higher education; and with gratitude for your visionary leadership in creating the partnership between Cornell and Technion, pioneering a new paradigm for higher education at Cornell Tech and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute.
Prof. Edwin L. (Ned) Thomas
In acknowledgement of your breakthrough contributions to the fields of nanotechnology and the structure and properties of materials; in tribute to your application of nanocomposite systems to useful solutions from medicine to security; and with gratitude for your support of the Technion and the State of Israel.
Eyal Waldman
In acknowledgement of your vision and determination to build a large company to strengthen Israel’s economy; in tribute to your contribution to Israel’s innovation and creativity; and in honor of your consistent support of science and engineering education for youth.
