The Wolf Foundation has announced the ten brides and grooms of the 2020 Krill Prize for young Israeli researchers

Among the winners of this year's award:  A researcher who developed a system that significantly saves energy, a researcher whose research findings have potential implications for the treatment of cancer and genetic diseases, and a researcher who focuses on plant behavioral processes such as plant decision-making, memory and cognitive behavior. * MThe head of the Wolf Foundation, Reut Yanon Berman: "Receiving the award is a significant step in personal development in the academic track, we are witness to the impressive achievements of the award recipients over the years, many of whom currently hold key positions in the leadership of scientific research in Israel and around the world."

The Wolf Foundation announced today the ten winners of the prestigious Creel Award for 2020. The award, worth $10,000 each, is awarded annually in the fields of exact sciences, life sciences, medicine, agriculture and engineering. The awards are intended for outstanding academic faculty members from universities in Israel who have not yet received tenure. The winners are selected by the foundation's scholarship committee from a list of dozens of outstanding candidates submitted by the universities.  CEO of the Wolf Foundation, Reut Yanon Berman:The real prize is the recognition, the recognition, the diploma and the loving embrace of the academy. To be nominated for the prize is an honor and a huge expression of confidence from the institution that presents them and sees its candidate as a great promise. Receiving the award is a significant step in personal development in the academic track. We are witness to the impressive achievements of the recipients of the award over the years, many of whom currently hold key positions in leading scientific research in Israel and around the world."

פKrill remains are given to promising young researchers who have demonstrated excellence in scientific research. Since 2005, every year, approximately 10 prizes have been awarded in Israel in the fields of exact sciences, life sciences, medicine, agriculture and engineering. The winners are selected by a judging committee on behalf of the Wolf Foundation from a long list of outstanding researchers submitted by Israeli universities. The selection of winners is made according to criteria of excellence, the research topic and its importance. So far, the prize has been awarded to 131 researchers. The candidates and candidacies, faculty members at the rank of lecturer or senior lecturer, who have not yet received tenure, are submitted to the judging committees by the research universities in Israel. Candidates and candidacies that the institution believes and sees as the next promising researchers. The award is considered a Wolf award for young researchers and hence its prestige and it is a significant step in the academic development path. The awards are financed from the estate of the donor Avraham Hirsch Karil Schlinger (1912-2007) born in Germany who immigrated with his wife to South America in 1938 and established a textile factory there. Karil was active in the Jewish community of German origin and an enthusiastic supporter of the State of Israel.

The winners for 2020:

Dr. Yonit Hochberg, Rakah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University. Winner of the 2020 Krill Award for her groundbreaking theoretical works in particle physics in general and dark matter research in particular.

Dr. Hochberg studies various aspects of dark matter particles, an as yet unknown component of the universe whose mass is five times greater than the mass of "normal" matter from which stars, galaxies and the matter in between are built. Dr. Hochberg proposed and developed an innovative model for strongly interacting dark matter known as -SIMP- which is distinctly different in its properties from the weakly interacting dark matter -WIMP - in which most of the works to date have dealt. She has shown that particles of this type can have a much lower mass than previously estimated, which requires completely different detection methods that she is helping to develop. Her work caused a revolution in the way of thinking of the community of scientists who have been searching for dark matter particles, without success, for decades. Dr. Hochberg also investigates other aspects of the elementary particles and focuses on the properties of the "weak interaction". Her works are known and famous in the world and she receives international recognition, awards and research grants.

Dr. Yasmin Maroz, School of Plant Sciences and Food Security, Tel Aviv University. Winner of the 2020 Krill Prize for her groundbreaking research, using physical tools and mathematical models, in plant behavior.

Yasmin Maroz has an extraordinary interdisciplinary background - in physics, mathematics, chemistry, bioinformatics, stochastic processes and plant sciences. Her recent works focus on the physics of growth systems. Maroz studies behavioral processes in plants such as decision making, memory and collective behavior. The experiments are based on the idea that behavioral responses in plants are expressed in their growth dynamics. According to her, "A tree cannot run away from attackers, it cannot look for food elsewhere, it is stuck there, that's what it is." Still, we see that there are many 500-year-old trees, so they must be doing something right." In her laboratory, Maroz monitors the movement of the entire plant as a response to controlled stimuli (for example light and gravity). Maroz uses mathematical models to deduce from the dynamics of growth the processes involved. The combination of physical tools, mathematical models and biological experiments, holds the potential for new understandings of plant behavior, from the level of the single cell to the whole plant, and even large groups of plants. These mathematical models contribute a lot to understanding the phenomenon of memory in plants, and the ability of plants to make decisions. Maroz works in cooperation with nine laboratories in the "GrowBot" project from around Europe with the common goal being one: to develop the first growing robot. A robot that acts like a climbing plant and is able to function and survive in complex terrain conditions, from disaster-stricken areas such as earthquakes to imaginary spaces such as outer space or the environment of a nuclear reactor. "Climbing plants know how to look for the most efficient way to reach the top. If you build a robot with the help of the same algorithms, it may be possible to produce a robot that is thrown to the bottom of the ruins of a house destroyed by an earthquake, and then it grows and looks for survivors." The research is in its early stages and has already produced preliminary findings.

Dr. Kafir Blum, Weizmann Institute of Science. Winner of the 2020 Krill Prize for unique and groundbreaking contributions in the fields of astrophysics and the physics of the elementary particles of matter.

Dr. Blum is a theoretical physicist whose research covers many diverse topics in the fields of physics, cosmology and particle research. His research in the field of cosmic radiation research - a collection of fast particles that are created throughout the universe - helped to explain the progress of these fast particles in space and the connections between matter and antimatter in this radiation. Bloom also studies many aspects of dark matter, an important and still poorly understood fundamental component that represents most of the mass in the universe. He proposed advanced models predicting that the interaction of particles of this material with hydrogen atoms affected the cosmic background radiation. He also studied the effect of dark matter on the creation of helium in the universe and proposed barriers to the properties of these particles in order to improve modern laboratory experiments being built around the world to discover them. Bloom works in active collaboration with experimental groups in the particle accelerator at CERN and his works serve as a source of inspiration for researchers in many fields of astrophysics and high energy physics.

Dr. Adam Tieman, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Bar Ilan University. Winner of the 2020 Creel Award for designing and developing circuits to improve the performance of energy saving systems.

With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, biomedical systems and Internet applications, energy efficiency and energy-saving operation of the components is in many cases the top requirement of the electronic circuits. For example, built-in memories in electronic components are the bottleneck of modern chips. They often require over 50% of the power consumption and occupy a large area of ​​the integrated circuits (IC). Dr. Yeman developed a breakthrough technology that showed potential to improve the performance of integrated circuit systems, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, where memory often takes up to 90% of the power and dead areas. He designs and develops new circuits to reduce the power consumption of built-in memories. This includes planning at the circuit level as well as algorithmic planning that will result in energy efficiency, such as through memory computing. Yemen's groundbreaking research led to a saving of about 50% in space and electricity consumption in memories, circuits and chips that are found in almost every electronic device around us.

Dr. Shraga Schwartz, Department of Molecular Genetics, Weizmann Institute of Science. Winner of the 2020 Krill Award for his works for mapping additional building blocks for RNA (RNA) and understanding their potential to change the genetic message transmitted by RNA and thus regulate the decision-making processes in the cell.

The research of Schwartz and his colleagues focuses on uncovering the basic building blocks that make up messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules that are used to translate the hereditary information stored in DNA. In his works, Schwartz deciphered the mechanism of action of one of the possible changes in messenger RNA, and discovered that it can change the genetic message. DNA is a kind of "instruction book" with the ability to change over time. Chemical tags attach to DNA in millions of places, changing the genetic instructions. In recent studies, it became clear that changes may occur in the genetic information even after the message has been "sent": the chemical tags can attach to messenger RNA, those transient molecules that transfer the recipe for assembling proteins from the DNA to the cellular machinery that builds the proteins. For decades it was common to think that RNA is made up of only four building blocks, but a series of studies from recent years, including the research of Schwartz and his colleagues published in the scientific journals Nature and Cell, identified and mapped additional building blocks for RNA and contributed to the understanding of their roles within the cell. Among other things, Schwartz and his colleagues showed that these building blocks have the potential to change the genetic message transmitted by the RNA, thus regulating the decision-making processes within cells. More than 100 changes may occur in messenger DNA, but only five are currently known to science. Moreover, only in recent years have scientists recognized the enormous importance of these changes, which are in fact a genetic control mechanism, and their ability to increase or decrease gene expression, or even activate or silence this or that gene. As a result, they play a role in most biological processes, and may be involved in a wide range of disease protection. The findings of Schwartz's research can contribute to the understanding of diseases in which there are mutations in the enzymes involved in the creation of the various building blocks, including cancer, severe obesity and degenerative brain diseases. Shraga Schwartz planned to become a doctor. He studied in a track that combines clinical studies and research, but about a year before finishing his medical studies, Schwartz decided to focus on scientific research.

Dr. Yakir Haddad, Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University. Winner of the 2020 Krill Prize for his research in the fields of wave physics and removing physical barriers in wave systems for the purpose of designing devices with improved performance.

Today's devices for transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves are fundamentally different from those that were used until a few years ago. Today it is about other materials, and space and power limitations that require other solutions. The researches of Yakir Hadad try to understand and solve problems of this kind. They focus on two main research topics: the first - bypassing physical barriers in wave systems for the purpose of designing devices with better performance, for example - a small antenna that is able to transmit with a large bandwidth, or an antenna that is able to transmit but not receive. The second - a better understanding of wave physics in complex media, in particular in non-linear systems that change in time and those in which there is a coupling between electromagnetic waves and acoustic waves. The research requires analytical and numerical methods which he develops, and built a first generation of standards. Haddad's work provided original theoretical solutions to complex problems in these fields. They are known and recognized in the world and have great influence and great potential for the future development of modern standards.

Dr. Idan Hod, Ben-Gurion University. Winner of the 2020 Krill Award for the development of innovative electrically conductive materials of the metal-organic framework type, and their utilization for capturing and storing solar energy, for coating electrodes, and for accelerating chemical reactions.

Dr. Hod's research is based on a unique family of innovative materials, called Metal-Organic Frameworks, which earned their inventor, Prof. Omar Yagi, the 2018 Wolf Prize for Chemistry. These are solid, highly porous materials, built as scaffolds XNUMXD, where organic molecules are connected by metal atoms. Although these materials have always been considered insulators for electric current, Dr. Hood found that they can be constructed as new conductive materials and used in an innovative and surprising way. He uses them as coating materials for electrodes, and for the development of innovative devices, such as fuel cells, batteries, supercapacitors and chemical sensors. His research group develops innovative methods for capturing solar energy and storing it as electrical or chemical energy using synthetic fuels. Their unique electrodes enable the utilization of solar energy to accelerate important chemical reactions, such as the creation of hydrogen from the decomposition of water and the capture of carbon dioxide from the air.

Dr. Tomer Michaeli, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion. Winner of the 2020 Krill Award for his groundbreaking work in the fields of signal and image processing, computer vision, and machine learning.

Visual data plays central roles in many fields, from medical imaging, microscopy, astronomy, security and autonomous vehicles, to personal photography and social media. Tomer Michaeli's research addresses theoretical and algorithmic challenges related to obtaining, reconstructing, improving, manipulating and editing such data. In the last decade, there has been tremendous progress in image processing methods, especially with the significant improvement of deep learning techniques. Despite the potential of such methods to produce information beyond the capacity of the human eye, their impact on fields such as medical imaging, scientific imaging and forensic laboratory, has been limited so far. This is due to various essential limitations, for example small data sets, inherent ambiguity in the visualization processes, and the lack of appropriate ways to integrate knowledge in learning-based methods. In his research, Tomer aims to provide theoretical analyzes of the limitations of imaging problems and offers practical algorithmic ways to overcome them. The research focuses, among other things, on the development of various techniques for image processing and reconstruction, which has a great impact in the fields of medicine and forensics. Recently, he was a partner in the development of an innovative technology for biological imaging based on single molecules that provides an accurate image with high resolution and unprecedented speed, and this without the need for prior knowledge of the shape of the model being tested.

Dr. Yuval Philmos, Faculty of Computer Science, Technion. Winner of the 2020 Krill Award for his research on discrete harmonic analysis in computer science.

Dr. Philmos' research is in theoretical computer science, in a field called "Boolean function analysis". Such functions appear, among others, in computationally complex problems, cryptography, graph theory, and combinatorial optimization. Already in his doctorate, Dr. Philmos solved a 30-year-old problem in graph theory, by proving the Simonovitz-Shosh conjecture. Philamus has since recorded many other achievements in the fields of: computational complexity - a field that studies the difficulty of performing certain calculations, election science - a field that studies schemes of elections, combinatorics - a mathematical field that studies discrete structures and combinatorial optimization - a field that studies the optimization of discrete functions.

Dr. Mirav Zahavi, the Department of Computer Science at Ben Gurion University wins the Krill Prize for her achievements in researching the complexity of various problems in graph theory

"Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day; Teach him to fish, he will swear all his life. I think that this well-known insight is very important not only in the research aspect, but in almost every aspect of life. In the research aspect" this insight proved itself to me again and again, says Zahavi.

Topics in the theory of computer science, and in particular in the study of algorithms, attracted Merev Zahavi by magic ropes already in her undergraduate studies. Her doctoral thesis dealt with the development of parametric algorithms for problems that have applications in bioinformatics. Currently, Dr. Zahavi researches in theoretical computer science, and specializes in the field of parametric algorithms. Dr. Zahavi has impressive achievements in researching the complexities of various problems in graph theory. By a sophisticated combination of innovative techniques, she has developed the fastest parametric algorithms for a number of fundamental problems. "The problems I investigate intrigue and challenge me every day. I don't see my occupation as 'work' but as a source of pleasure, creativity, independence, knowledge and self-realization".