He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz to budget NIS 100 million a year for the return of scientists to Israel. The universities, for their part, said Prof. Koh, will set aside a similar amount from their budgets for this purpose after they have been streamlined
The Board of Trustees of Bar-Ilan University today (Tuesday) unanimously elected Prof. Koa for another term, fifth in number, as President of Bar-Ilan University. The Board of Trustees praised the leadership of Prof. Kua.
Prof. Moshe Koa, 66 years old, has served as president of Bar-Ilan University since 1996 and is currently the oldest university president in Israel. In the past, he served three times as chairman of the committee of heads of universities.
In his speech to the Board of Trustees upon his election, Prof. Koa thanked for the trust in him. Prof. Koa reviewed the university's budget crisis, which originated from the global economic crisis and government policy, and even discovered that more than 60 million NIS were cut and so far no one has been fired. He also added that the topic of returning scientists to Israel will be at the top of his priorities as president of the university during the new term.
He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz to budget NIS 100 million a year for the return of scientists to Israel. The universities, for their part, said Prof. Koh, will set aside a similar amount from their budgets for this purpose.
Prof. Koa announced that despite the economic hardship, Bar-Ilan University, thanks to its overseas friends and internal streamlining operations, managed to bring back 15 Israeli scientists last year who were integrated into the university's teaching and research staff. He also said that the university intends to recruit senior scientists from abroad for the nanotechnology center that will be established at the end of this year and will include about 40 research laboratories with over 40 scientists.
Prof. Koa has published over 250 scientific articles on topics such as: disordered systems, solid state physics, theories of chaos in matter and the miniaturization of electronic devices. In 1971 he gained worldwide attention thanks to his dissertation, which disproved the "Bloch's law" established back in 1928 by the Nobel laureate, Prof. Felix Bloch, on the electrical conductivity of metals. Instead of this basic law, Prof. Koa and Prof. Natan Aviezer created a new law called the "Koa-Aviazer Law". In 1979, Prof. Koh, together with Nobel laureate Sir Neville Mott from the British University of Cambridge, outlined a new approach to turning insulators into metals, for which he won a special award from the Royal Society of Science in England. For his outstanding achievements in the field of physics, he was awarded many prestigious awards, on behalf of bodies and institutions in Israel and around the world.
In recent years, Prof. Koh has played a key role in the issues placed on the national agenda. He was one of the enthusiastic supporters of the conclusions of the Na'amen Committee, which outlined solutions to the problem of conversion in Israel, strongly opposed religious coercion on the public or parts of it through Knesset laws, supported the decisions of the Supreme Court judges in the face of offensive expressions uttered towards them by ultra-Orthodox politicians, and worked tirelessly to promote Worldwide Jewish unity. Prof. Koa's worldview is based on three fundamental principles: the importance of the concept of "All of Israel"; the centrality of the "respect for humanity" principle; And the priority that should be given to the value of "peace" over "truth". In a wider circle, he outlined ten central challenges, like the Ten Commandments in the current version, that modern Orthodoxy and religious Zionism should face, both in Israel and abroad. These principles have been incorporated in the last 12 years in the calendar of the university's systems.
Prof. Kova is a research fellow at the Cavendish Laboratories at the University of Cambridge and an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He serves as the chief scientist at the Minerva Center for Mesoscopy at Bar-Ilan University, and also heads the Reznik Center for Advanced Technology, which recruited and trained outstanding scientists from the United States who immigrated to Israel.
