Foto Friday – Yoram Reshef’s pride of researchers
Filed under: Art, Business, Environment, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Medical Breakthroughs, Profiles, Technology
Yoram Reshef heads a commercial photography studio that produces images for some of Israel’s leading brands. “I love taking pictures in factories,” he says. “The encounter with machinery, the steel, the noise is exciting to me. I’m very proud of Israeli industry which creates and produces a world of its own, just as I, as a photographer, produce photos and images for my clients.” Reshef also takes pride in the work he does for institutions such as Tel Aviv University (TAU), producing portraits of scientists and academics working on technology’s cutting edge.
For example, marine biologist Prof. Yehuda “Hudi” Benayahu, a world-renowned expert in the taxonomy, ecology and biology of soft corals. Benayahu has warned that coral extinction could mean a global environmental catastrophe.
Or archeologist Yifat Thareani-Sussely, whose doctoral dissertation focuses on the pottery of the 7-8th centuries BCE. Don’t be fooled by the antiquities around her: TAU’s Department of Archaeology includes a Laboratory for Comparative Microarchaeology, an Archaeobotany Lab, Pottery Restoration Lab and other high-tech methods used for exploring the ancient world.
Biochemist Prof. Gali Prag researches proteins, specifically ubiquitin, a dynamic regulatory signal that can affect protein activity. A former researcher at NIH, he was recruited to head his own lab and the university has high hopes for his future research.
Adv. Liat Golan is the professional director of the Alfred Akirov Institute for Business and Environment. An environmental lawyer by trade, she trains the next-generation of business leaders to meet the threats and opportunities created by rapidly changing environments, both natural and corporate.
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Tel Aviv University alumnus Chemi Peres, managing general partner and co-founder of venture capital firm, Pitango Venture Capital, continues to be involved by serving on the Board of Directors of Ramot, the commercial arm of the university that focuses on technology transfer with some very nice success stories to its credit.
By the way, Peres also chairs the advisory board of TAU’s Faculty of Management — as well as serving on the boards of the Weizmann Institute of Science and the IDC- Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya. More about those fine institutions another day.
CNN scents ISRAEL21c flower story
CNN World Report this week broadcast Molly Livingstone’s excellent piece for ISRAEL21c on floral scent research at Hebrew University.
Young Underwater Archeologist, Beverly Goodman, Wins National Geographic Explorer Prize
I first “fell in love” with Beverly Goodman, when I dropped in to see the marine research station where she works in Eilat. Hoping to score some research material for my next series of articles, Goodman, a young Canadian-Israeli researcher working there, would go on to give me exciting details about her work in underwater archeology. Not before going through a long list of other marine research, some linked to climate change, happening at the research facility, known as the IUI.
Goodman, I would learn, had been interviewed about her work for a National Geographic program. She’d been collecting core samples from the seabed off the coast of the Roman city Caesaria. After inventing her own method for extracting the cores (she explains it’s practically impossible using traditional methods), Goodman would dive down to the seafloor and pull up layers of sediment to read back into history and find clues about what might have caused the destruction of Caesaria.
You can read all the deets on ISRAEL21c, which I’ve made handy for you here — Israel’s Freshest Face in Archeology Works Underwater — but her story goes like this:
Goodman’s research may give science new clues about the coastal environment in the context of global warming. Are the seas rising? Could a melting glacier break off and create a tsunami? Will storms and floods increase as the earth warms? Goodman’s questions might be more local in nature, but her work has global significance by adding to the information science holds about earth events and climate change.
Sifting through broken shells and sediment from coring samples, she has determined that at least three ancient tsunamis struck Israel’s port of Caesarea in the past. Concurrently, she also works in the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba to determine how local flood cycles and sea levels have changed over time.
I’m apparently not Goodman’s only big fan. Our editor Nicky, at ISRAEL21c and ISRAELITY, sent me a notice she’d received from National Geographic this week. It went on to state that Beverly, was awarded awarded $10,000 by National Geographic and is one of the media mogul’s Emerging Leaders, “one of 10 visionary young trailblazers from around the world,” the magazine/news channel writes.
The program recognizes and supports uniquely gifted and inspiring adventurers, scientists, photographers and storytellers making a significant contribution to world knowledge through exploration while still early in their careers. Introduced in this month’s issue of National Geographic magazine, you can also see a web feature of Goodman and her cohorts at http://www.nationalgeographic.com. A few months ago she appeared on a Nat Geo program, too.
“National Geographic’s mission is to inspire people to care about the planet, and our Emerging Explorers are outstanding young leaders whose endeavors further this mission. We are pleased to support them as they set out on promising careers. They represent tomorrow’s Edmund Hillarys, Jacques Cousteaus and Dian Fosseys,” said Terry Garcia, a rep from Nat Geo.
Goodman deserves it and I look forward to reading about her new advances: She knows about water and the forces of nature. She grew up on the shores of Lake Superior at Whitefish Bay in Canada, 17 miles from where the legendary freighter, the Edmund Fitzgerald, floundered and then sank.
She told me poetically, in the ISRAEL21c article: “As much as I love the shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, Israel is different,” she says. “Israel has been a crossroads forever. The time scale is so long. We can get a historical and pre-historical perspective from a long view, while being connected to well-known historical events.”
Read all about Goodman, and her great work on underwater archeology, here at ISRAEL21c.
More Israeli award winners:
Waltz With Bashir Gets Oscar Nod
Israeli Singer Shiri Maimon Wins MTV Prize
Israeli Film Students Come Out As Prizewinners in International Student Film Festival
Economic crisis? Not quite yet
The economic news these days is depressing, gloomy, and quite frankly downright scary. And while Israel hasn’t yet fallen victim to the hysteria that is sweeping the US and the UK, where spending has collapsed overnight, the malls here are beginning to feel the first fall in sales as customers hold on to their wallets a little bit tighter.
Nice to read today then that despite the worsening financial climate, Israeli high-tech companies still managed to raise $600 million in the third quarter of the year – an eight year quarterly high, and up 45 percent from a year earlier, according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center.
The IVC said the third-quarter capital raising exceeded all projections – and you can see it in the news. Just a couple of days ago, an Israeli Internet start-up, iSkoot, raised $19 million in investment. Most of the investment was in communications, followed closely by the Internet sector.
It can’t stay like this, however. VC’s are already warning people that belts are tightening, and that companies must reduce their burn-rate drastically if they are to survive.
“We don’t expect the same rate of investment in the coming quarters,” said Efrat Zakai, director of research at IVC. “However, 2008 will be logged as a record year, even if the fourth quarter comes in considerably below average.”
In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli high-tech companies raised $1.68 billion from local and foreign venture investors, up 34 percent from the same period of 2007.
“Israeli high-tech companies, responding to early signs of market changes and the falling dollar-shekel rate, have been raising follow-on capital to help them navigate through the long-anticipated global crisis,” Zeev Holtzman, chairman of IVC Research Center and Giza Venture Capital, told reporters.
It’s interesting to see how countries react to the current financial crisis. The UK and the US are undoubtedly deeply traumatized, but here in Israel, you can’t help get the feeling that people just aren’t taking it all that seriously.
Maybe it’s just a question of time, maybe, however, it’s a question of character. The Israelis kinda like a crisis. It’s a chance to come up with interesting solutions using a bit of old string, an elastic band, and a great deal of imagination.
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