Three Israeli Researchers Snag Top Science Award

November 29, 2017 | Three Israeli researchers have won a top science award and a $100,000 prize each. The 2018 Blavatnik Awards, a signature program of the Blavatnik Family Foundation administered by the New York Academy of Sciences and were awarded in Israel for the first time, in collaboration with the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. They were given to Dr. Oded Rechavi, a senior lecturer at the Department of Neurobiology at Tel Aviv University, for his “groundbreaking work uncover[ing] novel mechanisms of inheritance” for traits and diseases; Dr. Charles Diesendruck, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Technion’s Schulich Faculty of Chemistry, whose work “shows exceptional promise in the growing field of ‘mechanochemistry,’ where mechanical force is used to drive chemical reactions or changes; and Professor Anat Levin, an associate professor at the Andrew & Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion for her “ground-breaking contributions to the emerging field of computational photography.” The winners were announced by the Blavatnik Family Foundation in a press release. The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists are handed to promising young scientists and engineers under the age of 42 and were first established in 2007. The Israeli scientists will be honored at a formal ceremony in Jerusalem on February 4, 2018.