Maayan Keshev

Dr. Maayan Keshev is a new faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research examines the cognitive process of understanding language.

Through psycholinguistic experiments, Maayan examines how readers and listeners extract meaning from a sentence quickly and efficiently (even before it is complete).

As an Azrieli Fellow, Maayan will investigate comprehenders’ predictions regarding the unfolding of sentences. Specifically, her project will examine whether, in this prediction process, comprehenders use abstract grammatical categories that unite a broad array of words or word strings. The project will contribute to core debates in linguistics about the balance between abstract generative knowledge and the knowledge of regularities associated with specific words.

Maayan completed her PhD at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Aya Meltzer-Asscher. During her doctoral studies, she examined how comprehenders use grammatical knowledge and past experience to overcome ambiguity and errors in sentences they read. Her work was among the first to explore sentence processing in Hebrew. In her postdoctoral work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Maayan investigated questions about the source of comprehension errors with her advisor, Prof. Brian Dillon. She advanced an account of interference between multiple linguistic elements that have to be concurrently maintained in memory. Maayan lives with her spouse, Ofir, and their dog, Fudge. She enjoys sewing clothes, eating chocolate, and sunshine.

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Ella Klik

Dr. Ella Klik is a new faculty member in the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her areas of expertise are media theory, materiality, and aesthetics.

Specifically, her research deals with technological innovation and traces the emergence of media economies shaped by storage space constraints, which are mitigated by a host of reusable design strategies.

As an Azrieli Fellow, Ella will extend her research into the contemporary tech landscape by combining historical approaches to studying analog recording technologies with an analysis of emerging storage solutions, such as commercial server farms in orbit and undersea, DNA storage, and blockchain. Ultimately, her aim is to critically examine the underlying assumptions and values that fuel future visions of data storage as unencumbered by physical limitations.

Ella received her PhD from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she explored the “life” cycle of media: from engineering to production, use, and, eventually, discard. She has held fellowships in various institutions worldwide, including the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, NYU Shanghai, the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, and the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. All of these interdisciplinary spaces and the colleagues she has encountered throughout her academic journey have contributed to her intellectual fascination with the ways in which media shape our present and, no less crucially, our futures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ella enjoys consuming science fiction books and films in her spare time.

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Elena Meirzadeh

Dr. Elena Meirzadeh is a new faculty member in the Department of Molecular Chemistry and Materials Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Her research centres on the synthesis of novel nanomaterials and holds great promise for cutting-edge technologies like clean energy and new optical and electronic devices.

As an Azrieli Fellow, Elena will explore how superatoms, namely, atomically precise nanoscale building blocks, interact in the gas phase, form intermolecular covalent bonds, and crystallize as infinite extended structures.

Elena completed her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Meir Lahav and Prof. Igor Lubomirsky at the Weizmann Institute of Science and developed an extremely sensitive technique for detecting deviations from symmetry in crystals. Using pyroelectric measurement, she was able to improve our fundamental understanding of crystal structure, function, and different growth mechanisms. During her postdoctoral research as a Rothschild Fellow at Columbia University in New York City, she created a new form of carbon, named graphullerene, which consists of layers of fullerene molecules peeled into two-dimensional sheets as thin as a single molecular carbon

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Yaara Oren

Dr. Yaara Oren is a new faculty member in the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.

Yaara’s research merges concepts from evolutionary biology and cancer research, combining computational tools with experimental approaches to understand how cancer cells can evade therapy.

As an Azrieli Fellow, she will generate new systems to study cancer “persister” cells: a rare cell population that is highly tolerant to treatment and lacks any underlying genetic cause. Understanding the basics of cancer persistence will enable the development of better therapies that could potentially delay or even prevent disease recurrence.

Yaara received her BSc and PhD in cell biology and microbiology from Tel Aviv University. In her PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Tal Pupko and Prof. Eliora Ron, she studied the evolution of harmless commensal bacteria into deadly pathogens. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Harvard Medical School, she studied how a subset of drug-tolerant cancer cells regain proliferative capacity which leads to disease recurrence. Yaara lives in Tel Aviv with her spouse, Lior, and their children, Arielle and Allon. She enjoys exploring different bakeries every week on her way home from the beach.

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Truong San Phan

Dr. Truong San Phan is an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Systems Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Prof. Ido Amit.

San’s research focuses on the regulatory network of barrier tissue environments, such as the skin, in inflammatory diseases.

Epithelial barriers represent the first contact organs to the outer environment and are frequently exposed to multifactorial stressors inducing infection, injury, and inflammation, which may lead to chronic inflammatory diseases. Using single-cell genomic technologies and epigenetic approaches, San aims to uncover tissue-imprinted tolerance and inflammation memory mechanisms in inflammatory diseases. Understanding these principles will help our understanding of how chronicity of inflammatory diseases and their dynamic progressions are regulated and how inflammation is epigenetically encoded over time. San hopes that his research will facilitate the development of new combined therapies to break the vicious cycle of inflammation and heal pathogenic tissue states.

San was born and raised in Berlin and obtained a BSc and MSc in biological sciences from the University of Konstanz, where he went on to pursue his PhD in biochemical pharmacology under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Brunner. His central PhD project focused on elucidating the role of skin-derived glucocorticoids in local skin homeostasis and in prevalent inflammatory skin diseases, highlighting their important immunosuppressive function. Besides science and lecturing, San enjoys being in nature, taking part in social activities and outdoor challenges, and combining all of these in the Alps.

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Tom Hope

Dr. Tom Hope is a new faculty member in the Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research scientist at The Allen Institute for AI (AI2).

Tom develops artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) methods to augment and scale scientific knowledge discovery by harnessing vast and diverse repositories of scientific knowledge.

He aims to create computational methods that mine scientific literature and knowledge bases to help discover new directions and solutions to problems, generate hypotheses, make predictions and decisions, and build connections across different ideas and areas. As an Azrieli Fellow, Tom will explore AI and NLP methods for automatically extracting and organizing all mentions of challenges and directions across the scientific literature, including specific limitations, uncertainties, hypotheses and promising findings. This will enable systems that can detect and monitor areas of difficulty and gaps in knowledge and recommend new directions for problem- solving across the sciences.

Tom completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Dafna Shahaf, working on using machine learning to augment creativity. His work received four best paper awards and appeared in high impact journals, including Nature and Science. While pursuing his PhD, Tom also led an applied AI research team at Intel. He conducted postdoctoral research at AI2 (Semantic Scholar group) and the University of Washington, working with Prof. Daniel Weld and Prof. Eric Horvitz to create systems that help scientists and medical doctors dealing with COVID-19 to find important knowledge and identify new research directions. Tom was selected for the Global Young Scientists Summit (2021) and the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (2019) and was a member of the SIGKDD Best Paper Award Committee (2020). He lives with his wife, Elia, and son, Jordan, in Jerusalem.

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Stefano Baiguera

Dr. Stefano Baiguera is an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physics Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

His research, under the supervision of Dr. Shira Chapman, deals with the interplay between quantum information and black holes.

The holographic principle is a theoretical duality relating quantum mechanical phenomena to the physics of gravitational systems. This surprising link connects the theoretical properties of astronomical objects, like black holes, to the optimization of quantum computers. In particular, the interior of a black hole can be related to computational complexity, which is the difficulty of implementing a certain operation. Stefano’s research also focuses on the study of nonrelativistic theories which lead to a controlled framework for analyzing quantum systems and their dual gravitational description.

Stefano was born in Italy and studied for his BSc and MSc in physics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Brescia. He completed his PhD in physics at the University of Milano- Bicocca under the supervision of Prof. Silvia Penati and then continued to a postdoctoral position at the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) in Copenhagen under the supervision of Prof. Troels Harmark and Prof. Niels Obers. Besides research, Stefano enjoys playing board games, trading card games, and playing chess and football with friends.

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Shlomit Bechar

Dr. Shlomit Bechar is a new faculty member in the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. Shlomit is an archaeologist who specializes in the study of material culture in general and the analysis of ceramic assemblages in particular. She has been excavating at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tel Hazor since 2007, which she also co-directed (2016–2021). Starting in 2023, she will lead a new research project in the lower city of Hazor.

Shlomit’s research focuses on questions of social differentiation, cultural interconnections, and economic changes and challenges, and on identifying methods of resilience to climate change.

She explores these research questions through a network of local and international collaborations using new scientific methods. As an archaeologist, her goal is to integrate these issues within broader historical research questions. During her Azrieli fellowship, she will investigate how human utilization of wetlands contributed to the rise of urbanization, using environmental- archaeological methods of analysis, such as analysis of geological cores, stable isotopes, flora and fauna, petrography, and architecture and ceramics. This will be done with a multidisciplinary team of scholars from Israel and abroad.

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Shiri Ron

Shiri Ron is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Prof. Shahar Dobzinski.

She is interested in algorithmic mechanism design, which is a subfield at the intersection of computer science and microeconomic theory.

In her work, she aims to design algorithms for settings in which people may benefit by providing the algorithm with false or biased information. Examples of such settings are the assignment of medical students to internships and government auctions for allocating public goods, such as radio spectrum, electricity, and housing. Her interest in this subject also led her to take part in the implementation of the 5G spectrum auction held by the Israeli Ministry of Communications.

Shiri was born in Tel Aviv, where she currently lives with her partner. She received her BSc in computer science and psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her MSc in computer science from the Weizmann Institute, also under the supervision of Prof. Dobzinski. Before and during her undergraduate studies she volunteered at Sahar, where she provided hotline support for people undergoing emotional distress. In her spare time, Shiri enjoys yoga, reading, and playing beach volleyball.

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Shir Genzer

Shir Genzer is a PhD student in the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Azrieli Early Career Faculty Alum Prof. Anat Perry.

Her research focuses on the mechanisms that enable us to understand others’ emotions and feelings, specifically, how different information channels (visual, auditory, and semantic) contribute to cognitive and affective empathy.

She combines behavioural, physiological, and EEG methods as well as advanced statistical methods (e.g., mixed model analysis, Bayesian modelling analysis) to analyze the empathy abilities of both neurotypical people, people with clinical conditions such as autism and ADHD, and stroke patients. Shir hopes to shed light not only on deficits but also on conditions that enhance the emotion recognition abilities of individuals from these clinical populations. By shifting the focus from difficulties to strengths, she hopes to facilitate the development of better intervention approaches and improve the daily social functioning of neurodiverse individuals.

Shir was born and raised in Bet Lehem Haglilit with three sisters: an identical twin and two younger sisters who are also identical twins. She received her BSc in psychobiology and the Amirim Natural Sciences Program from the Hebrew University, where she was an active member of the student union, working to improve the rights of students. In her free time, Shir volunteers with autistic children and enjoys dancing, reading, and spending time with her family and friends

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