Six senior scientists join the Israeli National Academy of Sciences

 The six are: Prof. Moshe Oren from the Weizmann Institute, Prof. Moshe Idel from the Hebrew University, Prof. Gideon Dagan from Tel Aviv University, Prof. Sergio Hart from the Hebrew University, Prof. Shulamit Volkov from Tel Aviv University and Prof. David Kashdan from the Hebrew University

 On Tuesday December 19, 2006, the Israel National Academy of Sciences will hold the traditional ceremony of awarding the Academy's membership certificates to six researchers joining its ranks. The new members, professors from the universities in Israel, were elected at the Academy's general assembly based on the recommendation of the Academy's members from its two divisions, the Humanities Division and the Natural Sciences Division.

The Academy, the highest body in the scientific community, was founded by law in 1960 with the aim of bringing together the best scientific personalities in Israel in order to foster and promote scientific activity in the country and to advise the Israeli government on actions related to research and scientific planning of national importance.
The members of the Academy number 94 researchers, of which 52 are from the natural sciences and 42 from the humanities and social sciences.

And these are the six friends:

Prof. Moshe Oren, from the Weizmann Institute of Science, is one of the best researchers in molecular biology in Israel and around the world. An original scientist who made a unique and groundbreaking contribution to the clarification of the molecular basis of the cancer process caused by a malfunction of the 53p gene. His work opened a new era in molecular biology in the field of cancer research.
The cloning of the p53 gene was a lever for the beginning of extensive research in many laboratories that led to the understanding that the p53 gene is the main factor in protecting our body against the development of cancerous processes. Prof. Oren played an important role in achieving this understanding by showing that the protein p53, which is the product of the p53 gene, is able to suppress the appearance of cellular changes that involve cancer behavior. A few years later, his group proved in laboratory models that p53 may trigger the "suicide" process of cancer cells. Based on this finding, an innovative cancer treatment was developed through gene therapy.
His later research deals with understanding the molecular mechanisms that control the action of the p53 protein in healthy cells and cancer cells. Among other things, these studies led to the clarification of the importance of the ubiquitin system in ensuring the proper activity of p53 as a cancer suppressor.
Prof. Oren has published over two hundred works in the best scientific journals, including review articles and book chapters. He won a number of prestigious awards including: the Lombroso Award for Cancer Research (2002), the Emet Award (2003) and the NIH Award of Excellence (2003).

Prof. Moshe Idel, who holds the Max Cooper Chair of Jewish Thought in the Department of Israeli Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is an internationally renowned expert in the study of Kabbalah, Sabbatarianism, Messianism, Hasidism and other areas of Israeli thought. In his research he discovered unknown compositions of Kabbalah and described methods and currents in Kabbalah. By deepening his research into the beginnings of Kabbalah in the 12th and 13th centuries, he revealed a conceptual continuity between the thought of the sages of the Talmud and Midrash and Kabbalah in the Middle Ages.
Prof. Idel taught as a visiting professor at various universities abroad, including Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California in Los Angeles, the Collège de France in Paris, the Central European University
in Budapest and universities in Moscow and Romania. Prof. Idel published dozens of articles and books in many languages.
Among the notable awards he has won: the Han Bialik Prize for Israeli Wisdom (1993), the Gersham Shalom Prize for the Study of Kabbalah from the Israeli National Academy of Sciences (1995), the Israel Prize in the Field of Jewish Thought (1999) and the Emet Prize (2002). He was elected a member of the American Academy of Jewish Studies in New York (1992) and in 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Yale University.

Prof. Gideon Dagan, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Flow and Heat Transfer of the Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University, is one of the world's leading researchers in the field of hydrology. His main research topics are the development of theoretical and applied models of water movement and pollution processes in soil and groundwater. The models he developed are currently used as a basis for understanding and predicting processes that occur in the upper soil layer (rainwater seepage, irrigation and drainage and transport of materials) and in aquifers (groundwater utilization and changes in water quality due to pollution and salinization). Prof. Dagan's many works have gained and still continue to gain interest in the international community, due to the importance of the issue of water resources around the world.
He won prestigious awards and honors including: the Horton Award (1984) and the Horton Medal (2005). He was elected as a fellow of the American Geophysical Society (1989); won the Stockholm Water Prize, awarded by the King of Sweden (1998); He received honorary doctorate degrees from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris (1996) and the University of Bucharest (2006) and since 1998 he is a member of the Water Academy in Oslo. His name was included in the list of the most cited scientists in engineering and ecology of the American ISI for 2001.

Prof. Sergio Hart, a researcher at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, the Department of Economics, and the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the world's leading mathematical economists. His field of expertise is game theory. His works excel in building connections between different approaches in game theory and between these approaches and phenomena in various fields of application. Prof. Hart is a world-class researcher in game theory, mathematical economics and economic theory. Among his important contributions are studies on the formation of cooperation in a strategic way; Effective use of information in multi-stage interactions ("repeated games"); Dynamic models of learning, adaptation and evolution when the participants have "bounded rationality"; Situations of competition in economic models and the relationship between them and different approaches to solving problems of "fair" distribution. He also contributed with his works in other fields, for example in combinatorics and computational geometry in computer science.
Prof. Hart founded the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and served as its director for the center's first eight years.
In 1975 he won the Israel Security Award, after combining his studies at Tel Aviv University with service in the IDF Academic Reserve. He won, among other things, the Rothschild Prize (1998) and was invited to give the prestigious Wallers-Bowley lecture (2003). He currently serves as the president of the Israeli Mathematics Association and as the vice president of the World Society for Game Theory.

Prof. Shulamit Volkov, holder of the Konrad Adenauer Chair in Comparative European History in the Department of General History at Tel Aviv University, a historian with an international reputation for researching the history of Germany in the new era. She left a deep mark on her fields of research and is one of the most important researchers of the history of German Jewry in the last two hundred years.
Prof. Volkov brought forth sharp insights into modern anti-Semitism, its conceptual origins, its social and cultural causes and the political roles it played and made a very important contribution to understanding the modernity project of German Jews and its contradictions and complexity. In her research enterprise and her academic activity she enriched the historical discourse in the State of Israel.
Her research in recent years also deals with aspects of the history of the Holocaust and the historical writing about it, as well as the social-intellectual history of the late Enlightenment period, and not only in Germany. In this framework, she wrote about the beginnings of deaf education in Europe and the history of sign language.
Her articles, which deal with the unique demographic, social and cultural characteristics of German Jewry, have received a wide response among researchers, especially in Germany, and she was invited to serve as a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin and the Institute of History in Munich. She wrote and edited a long series of articles and books in Hebrew and German.
Prof. Volkov won, among other things, the Friedrich Gondolf Prize on behalf of the German Academy of Language and Literature (1998). She served as the head of the Institute of German History and the head of the School of History at Tel Aviv University and trained many students, some of whom are researchers at universities in Israel and abroad.
Prof. David Kashdan, who joined the faculty of the Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem about four years ago, is one of the most prominent and leading mathematicians in the world. The field most associated with his name is the representation theory of groups. A notable discovery of his from the beginning of his journey is the recognition of the multi-faceted meaning of a certain feature of the group that he called 'T feature', and today it is recognized all over the world as the 'Kashdan feature'. Beyond the theoretical implications of this concept, it is of great importance in the practical development of computer science and communication.
Prof. Kashdan's activity in mathematics is multidisciplinary, and as mentioned the field most associated with his name is the theory of bundles, and especially the theory of representations of bundles. The group concept is one of the most basic in mathematics, and the origin of group theory is in symmetry phenomena known from geometry and nature in general. The theory of bundle representations has long been known to be important in modern physics, and within mathematics it touches many fields - from Fourier's theory of classical analysis to modern algebra. Following Prof. Kashdan's works, the importance of the interrelationship with the field of geometry also became clear.
Prof. Kashdan was elected a member of the American National Academy of Sciences (1990) and in the same year was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for young researchers. He served as head of the mathematics department at Harvard University (1993-1996). In the few years that Prof. Kashdan was in Israel, he greatly influenced mathematics in Israel.