Professor Peretz Lavi was elected the next president of the Technion

The decision of the Technion's executive committee headed by Yoram Elster was based on the recommendation of the committee to appoint a president which received the overwhelming support of the Technion professors

The Executive Committee of the Technion headed by Mr. Yoram Elster decided last night to appoint Professor Peretz Lavi as the next president of the Technion. The executive committee's decision was based on the recommendation of the committee to appoint a president, which received the overwhelming support of the professors at the Technion. The appointment is subject to the approval of the Corterio (Technion's international board of trustees) which will meet at the beginning of June. Professor Lavi will assume his position as president of the Technion on October 2009, XNUMX and will replace Professor Yitzhak Apluig, who will complete two terms of office of four years each.

Professor Peretz Lavi, 60 years old, was born in Petah Tikva and grew up in Zichron Yaakov. He is the father of sleep medicine and modern sleep research in the State of Israel, one of the most prominent sleep researchers in the world and winner of the AMT award in the field of medicine. His research has a huge impact on the quality of life of many people in Israel and around the world. His works from the late XNUMXs and early XNUMXs proved that sleep breathing disorders, which until then were considered a rare disorder, are very common disorders in the adult population and have a decisive effect on the morbidity of the heart and blood vessels. These findings had a decisive impact on the extensive development of sleep medicine in the entire world and Professor Lavi's many publications have been cited thousands of times so far.

Professor Lavie is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sleep Research, one of the two most important scientific journals in the field of sleep research, he has published eight books, written over 300 scientific articles and given hundreds of lectures around the world. His best-selling book "The Magical World of Sleep" was published by the prestigious Yale University Press and translated into 14 languages.

In 1979 Professor Lavi founded the Technion Center for Sleep Medicine. The center expanded greatly due to the great demand and now has branches throughout the country. He was even a partner in the establishment of a sleep medicine center affiliated with the Harvard University School of Medicine in Boston, based on the model of the center at the Technion. So far more than one hundred thousand people have been tested at the Technion Center. The "Silent Channel" was introduced on the radio at the suggestion of Professor Lavi during the First Gulf War, it was activated only in the event of a missile attack and allowed the citizens of Israel to sleep without fear of being woken up by the sound of the alarms. The "Quiet Channel" has since been activated also in the Second Lebanon War and in the "Cast Lead" operation. The cancellation of the "Zero Hour" in elementary schools also follows Professor Lavi's recommendation to the Ministry of Education, after his studies revealed that it has a negative effect on the children, due to the lack of sleep it causes them. The change in the orders of the General Staff regarding the sleeping hours of the soldiers also follows the advice given by Professor Lavi to the IDF. He also played a part in the public struggle in the XNUMXs for the leadership of "Daylight Saving Time" in Israel.

Professor Lavi served for six years as the Dean of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion and for seven years served as the Technion's Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development. During his tenure as vice president, over half a billion dollars were raised for the Technion.
Professor Peretz Lavi is married to Dr. Lina Lavi, senior research member at the Technion Institute for Research and Development, father of two daughters and a son, grandfather of two grandchildren.

Below are the words that Prof. Lavi gave before the Technion's academic plenary at the beginning of the week

I would like to thank the committee for selecting a president for the trust they placed in me, I accept the nomination with great excitement, with a deep sense of commitment and with an awareness of the weight of responsibility placed on the shoulders of the president of the Technion, especially in the current period. I would also like to compliment the committee on its exemplary work.

If I gain your trust, the trust of the Executive Committee and the Curatorium, I will enter the position of President during a period that can be defined as a dim light. We are in the midst of an almost unimaginable crisis in the global economy, and at the same time there is a deep crisis in higher education in the State of Israel. I will not exaggerate the economic crisis that embraces the entire world and has already received countless surgeries. It is easy to understand that in an economy where the number of unemployed increases from month to month, and especially in knowledge-intensive professions, and the value of companies, including those dealing in high technologies, is erased almost overnight, that orders of precedence are changing, and not in favor of higher education. And if that's not enough, then one person, without conscience, shook the foundations of the generous Jewish community in the United States, and defrauded many good people, including the Technion and its supporters, out of huge sums.

Looking back, the years 2001-2008 were seven good years, even though the Internet bubble burst at the beginning. In these 7 years we raised donations in an unprecedented amount of about 600 million dollars. These donations allowed us to develop the Technion and lead it forward despite the deep cut in its budget by the government. Now we stand at the threshold of lean and poor years, in which we will have to make tremendous efforts to continue the development momentum of the Technion. Let's just hope that the lean years don't last 7 years either.

The global financial crisis is taking place against a background of increasing devaluation of the status of higher education in the State of Israel. Despite the importance of research universities, and the Technion in particular, to the country's economic and security resilience, fissures have emerged in the attitude of the administration and the public as a whole to the importance of universities. The State Comptroller's report published this month was considered the 11th blow. The day after the publication of the report, I went abroad to participate in an international scientific conference and on Friday, when I returned to Israel, I immersed myself in reading the newspapers that I had missed. I learned from them that the academic staff has "a poor understanding of the concept of academic freedom", that we ignore our status "as public servants" and sin "with a mixture of whining and arrogance". It is surprising how the State Comptroller did not find even one word of merit for the universities' contribution to the state and society. How is it that he, and the journalists who pounced on the report as the source of much loot, did not ask themselves how it is possible that without almost any development budgets and with ridiculous allowances for research, and a constant depletion of the academic faculty, the Technion manages to be among the leading universities of its kind in the world? It seems that the universities and the academic staff have become the punching bag of journalists and politicians alike. They forgot, or knowingly ignore, the tremendous contribution of higher education to the security, development and prosperity of the State of Israel.

I do not have a proven explanation for the question of why there has been such a large devaluation in the status of higher education and in the public's regard for academic faculty members, but the image of universities as ivory towers where hedonistic faculty members who are isolated from their surroundings are light years away from reality. The Technion's contribution to society can be witnessed by the thousands of graduates of the academic preparatory school from the suburbs who thanks to the preparatory school were admitted to academic studies, graduates of the Atidim program ordered by the Technion, graduates of the Noam program - outstanding Arab youth, graduates of the program for the advancement of the ultra-orthodox sector, as well as students of the Ofakim program that has just started and aims to train Thousands of engineers from the peripheral settlements in the next ten years. This can also be witnessed by the thousands of patients who use Azilact every day - the drug for Parkinson's disease developed by Professors Musa Zaim and John Feinberg at the Technion.
It is possible that the blame for the deterioration of our public status, at least in part, lies with us. We may not have been able to explain to the public what a university is and what a mission is. We have not clarified why the search for new and original knowledge cannot be dictated by demands for research that will immediately meet society's needs, and why basic academic research should not be judged by social standards based on immediate cost-benefit ratios for the public.

One of my tasks as president of the Technion will be to explain to the public and the government that when professors Avraham Hershko and Aharon Chachanover investigated the fate of proteins that were condemned to be eliminated from the body in the 70s, they did not do so because the good of society stood before their eyes, and not because they saw an immediate benefit in the results of their research. The motive for their research was the desire to know and understand the secrets of nature. But, about thirty years later, their groundbreaking discovery of how proteins are broken down led to the development of an anti-cancer drug that changed the fate of thousands of people around the world. I will never forget the reception ceremony on the eve of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Hershko Lechanover, which was held at the home of the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, the guest of honor at which was the first cancer patient in Sweden whose life was saved thanks to treatment with Valkid, the drug developed based on the results of their basic research on how proteins are broken down. Tears stood in the eyes of many of those present when the same patient confessed in a voice choked with excitement to two researchers who were involved in basic science and decades later changed his fate.

It is incumbent upon us to bring this wonderful story as a parable and an example to the researchers who shut themselves up, not in Migdal Shen, but in the building of the Faculty of Medicine that was once a monastery, and broke a new path that challenged everything that was known at the time about the breakdown of proteins. The discovery of Professors Hershko and Chechenover, although it was not made for this purpose, gave hope for life to cancer patients regardless of race, religion and country.

The freedom to investigate is not a prerogative, or an abstract principle. The freedom to explore is critical to the advancement of science and human society. Basic research is the lifeblood of academia, it is what separates the research university and college from the non-research university.

We must also recognize that we are in an era of radical transformations at the Technion. About seven and a half years ago, on July 1, 2001, when Prof. Afluig delivered his speech, then before the Senate, in order to win his trust, the Technion had 246 professors at the rank of full professor, since then, half of them, 124 in number, have retired, while 97 new faculty members rose to the rank of full professor and joined the academic plenary. Although these exchanges are a sign of renewal and refreshment, it cannot be ignored that during this period the status of the academic staff at the Technion was reduced by eighty-three standards. Says clearly and decisively, the number of faculty members at the Technion has reached the black line from which no matter what happens. The large decrease in the number of faculty members has a far-reaching effect on the functioning of the Technion and its mission and the number of faculty members should not continue to be cut.
Later, Professor Lavi spoke about his plans and vision regarding the future of the Technion, its development and prosperity.