The members of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities re-elected the Academy’s president, Prof. David Harel, a world-renowned computer scientist from the Weizmann Institute of Science, at the Academy’s general assembly, which took place on Tuesday, May 21, 2024. They also re-elected the Academy’s vice president, Prof. Margalit Finkelberg, a world-renowned classical studies scholar from Tel Aviv University. Both Prof. Harel and Prof. Finkelberg will be serving a second term.
The Academy also elected eight new members, whose entry into the Academy will be marked with a formal ceremony scheduled for Hanukkah later this year.
“I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to the members of the Academy for electing me to another term,” said Prof. David Harel, the president of the Academy. “I pledged to them that I would continue on the same path that I have walked as president until now, tirelessly, resolutely, and fearlessly too, when necessary, all for the good of the country, its science, and its culture.” He added, “With their election today, the Academy is blessed with a wonderful and elite group of eight researchers from many and diverse fields of knowledge, including several that have not been represented at the Academy until now. We wish them success and believe in their ability to strengthen the extensive activities of the Academy and assist in the fulfillment of its tasks, and encourage and develop scientific activity in Israel considering the challenges of this time.”
Below is a list of the new members who were elected to the Academy:
• Prof. Meir M. Bar-Asher, Arabic language and literature, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Prof. Guy Bar-Oz, archaeology, University of Haifa
• Prof. Ashraf Brik, chemical biology, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
• Prof. Tamar Dayan, zoology and ecology, The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv University
• Prof. Michael Elad, computer sciences, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
• Prof. Oded Goldreich, computer science, Weizmann Institute of Science
• Prof. Edwin Seroussi, musicology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Prof. David Weisburd, criminology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Prof. David Harel, who has been a member of the academic staff of the Weizmann Institute of Science since 1980, has served as the Academy’s president since 2021. He served as the head of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from 1989 to 1995, and dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science from 1998 to 2004. Prof. Harel co-founded I-Logix, which later became part of IBM. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked in IBM’s research department in New York, and spent his sabbatical years at Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, and the University of Edinburgh. He has been a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2010.
Prof. Harel’s principal areas of specialization in the past were in theoretical computer science (logic, computability, automata, and database theory). In recent decades, he has concentrated mainly upon software and systems engineering, studies on the modeling and reproduction of the sense of smell, and the modeling and analysis of biological systems and of prosody, the music of speech.
Prof. Harel is the inventor of Statecharts, a graphical language for describing the dynamics of systems. He is also the co-inventor of live sequence charts (LSCs) and of the Statemate, Rhapsody, Play-Engine, and PlayGo tools.
His books, Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing and Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can’t Do, have been translated into other languages, including Hebrew.
Prof. Harel is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1992); the Israel Prize (2004); the ACM Software System Award (2007); the EMET Prize (2010); the IEEE Computer Society’s Harlan D. Mills Award for software engineering; and five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and EATCS; a member of the Academia Europaea; a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).
During his first term as president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Prof. Harel led a move to strengthen the Academy’s advisory role, among other things by establishing a new division in the Academy that coordinates all advisory activities for the government, as well as strengthening its relationship with the various government ministries and relevant Knesset committees. Prof. Harel has led struggles to preserve the independence of the institutions of research, higher education, and Israeli culture against measures by the government, and has also worked extensively in the national arena to maintain Israel’s position at the forefront of global science, including against manifestations of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism on campuses throughout the world against the background of the October 7 massacre and the war that followed.
Prof. Margalit Finkelberg, Professor Emerita of Classics at Tel Aviv University and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2005, received her doctorate from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1986. Prof. Finkelberg is a scholar of the language, literature, and culture of ancient Greece. Her work encompasses many topics, including the language and literature of ancient Greece, particularly the poems of Homer; Aegean prehistory; poetic theory; mythological tradition, religion, and ethics in ancient Greece; and, recently, the writings of Plato.
Among Prof. Finkelberg’s books are The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998), Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition (2005); The Gatekeeper: Narrative Voice in Plato’s Dialogues (2018); and Homer and Early Greek Epic: Collected Essays (2019). In addition to publishing more than a hundred scholarly essays, she edited The Homer Encyclopedia (2011, three volumes), which won the RUSA Award for Outstanding Reference Sources in 2012. She has also translated several of Plato’s dialogues into Hebrew.
Prof. Finkelberg served as a research fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford; in the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University; and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. She led a research group at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies together with G. G. Stroumsa. She was also invited to give honor lectures at the University of Michigan and at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, as well as many guest lectures.
Prof. Finkelberg served as head of the Department of Classics at Tel Aviv University and as president of the Israeli Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies. She was a member of the executive committees of Tel Aviv University and of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, and served on various academic committees. She represented the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in international forums and served as chair of its Committee for the Advancement of the Humanities. She was elected vice president of the Academy in 2021.
Prof. Finkelberg is the 2012 recipient of the Rothschild Prize in the Humanities. She received the Rose Ettinger Award in 1994 for her Russian translation of The Jewish War by Flavius Josephus, which was published in Moscow. She was awarded the Gildersleeve Prize by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1991 for the best article of the year published in the American Journal of Philology.