Shahar Dubiner

Shahar is a PhD student in the School of Zoology at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Dr. Eran Levin and Prof. Shai Meiri.

Shahar studies the ecophysiology of reptiles and the drivers for its variation across time and space.

His research interests revolve around the meeting points between thermal biology, metabolism, diet, biological rhythms, biogeography, and conservation and spans a wide range of scales and methods from the molecular through the organismal to the macro-ecological. By studying reptiles’ diverse solutions to survive cold, heat, aridity, food shortage – and their inherent changes – Shahar hopes to expand our knowledge of how life can adapt to its environment.

Shahar grew up in Kibbutz Yahad in the Lower Galilee. He received his BSc in biology from Tel Aviv University, continuing immediately on the direct PhD track. He loves every kind of living organism – and even some of the dead ones. In his (sadly) limited free time, Shahar enjoys good books, music, mangoes, karate, and hiking in nature. His favourite punctuation mark is the left round bracket.

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Shachar Fraenkel

Shachar Fraenkel is a PhD student in the Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Goldstein.

Shachar research lies at the intersection between quantum information theory and quantum condensed matter theory, as he employs mathematical tools developed under the umbrella of the former to address fundamental problems within the latter.

Condensed matter theory deals with many-body systems, i.e., systems comprised of many microscopic particles that produce complex behaviours through their intercorrelations. In this context, Shachar mainly studies the entanglement properties of quantum many-body systems. Entanglement is a type of correlation between particles that is unique to quantum systems and defies classical intuition, providing a universal framework for the study of collective phenomena in such systems. Shachar analyzes entanglement in canonical theoretical models, hoping to elucidate its connection to foundational questions in quantum many-body physics, related to phase transitions, symmetries, and many-body systems out of equilibrium.

Shachar was born and raised in Haifa and currently lives in Tel Aviv. He received his BSc in mathematics and physics from Tel Aviv University. Alongside his research, Shachar teaches undergraduate physics courses at the university. He also previously taught middle- schoolers preparing to compete in the Physics Olympiad and worked as a personal tutor in Tel Aviv University’s support centre for students with learning disabilities. In his free time, Shachar enjoys photography, plays tennis, and has a deep interest in cinema, literature, history, and classical music.

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Serafima (Sima) Dubnov

Serafima (Sima) Dubnov is a PhD student in the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the collaborative supervision of Prof. Hermona Soreq and Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellow Dr. Mor Nitzan.

Serafima research combines advanced computational and molecular tools to investigate RNA regulation in the human brain at the level of single cells and cell types.

RNA research has an invaluable clinical potential, offering an opportunity to develop methods for both diagnostics and therapeutics. Sima is constructing a unique short RNA-Seq dataset of neurons and microglia extracted from live human brain samples in an attempt to identify cell type specific regulation by microRNAs and tRNA fragments. She is also developing a novel RNA-Seq data analysis approach based on information theory and hopes that her research will contribute to the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

Sima was born and raised in Moscow. She made aliyah after completing one year of a BSc in linguistics at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. After spending a year learning Hebrew, she started a BSc in psychobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and subsequently continued on the direct PhD track in neuroscience. In addition to her research, Sima also works as a teaching assistant at the Hebrew University and volunteers as a summer camp tutor in ALUT, the National Israeli Society for Children and Adults with Autism. Since the outbreak of the war between Russia and Ukraine, Sima has been helping new immigrants from both countries integrate into Israel. In her free time, she enjoys travelling, especially visiting her family in Moscow.

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Sarah Yona Zweig

Sarah Yona Zweig is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Witztum and Dr. Naphtali Meshel.

Her research focuses on the Moses episode in Sūrat al-Kahf 18:60–82 and its literary background in Late Antiquity.

Sarah traces the narrative predecessors of Moses’ journey to sources as diverse as the Gilgamesh Epos, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. By reading the classic Islamic commentaries as polytexts, she demonstrates their interplay with the many archives of Late Antiquity. Her research thus portrays the traditional exegetes as sensitive readers with their own modes of critical thought and philological practices. Sarah believes that motifs are instruments of transformation and that the world is comprised of stories and not of atoms.

Sarah grew up in Germany where she was a horse acrobat before making aliya to Israel. She obtained her BA in Greek philosophy and MA in comparative religion at the Hebrew University and also studied at both the Sorbonne in Paris and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Driven by a strong sense of social justice and a desire to explore visual parallels of emotional states, Sarah worked as a filmmaker in cinema and journalism for over a decade. She has lived, volunteered, and reported from India, China, Mongolia, Russia, the Syrian border, refugee camps in Germany, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and, most recently, the Ukrainian border. She was a fellow in the residence program at the Doha Institute for Advanced Studies in Doha, Qatar and a research fellow at the India International Centre in New Delhi. In her free time, Sarah likes to stand on her hands, play the oud disharmoniously, make furniture out of discarded wood, and explore hidden places.

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Sarah Libanore

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

Together with her supervisor, Azrieli alum Dr. Ely Kovetz, Sarah is investigating the structure and content of the universe and how it has changed over time, by studying the properties of the astrophysical sources and their distribution in time and space.

In her work, Sarah deals with two different kinds of sources: the gravitational waves, produced when two massive and compact objects, such as black holes, collide; and emissions of hot gas in the early universe. Exploiting the synergies between these techniques can provide us with a new and invaluable tool for studying astrophysics and cosmology and understanding the universe we live in.

Sarah was born in a small city in the north of Italy. She pursued her BA, MA, and PhD degrees at the University of Padova. Her PhD research, under the supervision of Prof. Michele Liguori and Prof. Alvise Raccanelli, focused on the clustering of gravitational wave sources to understand cosmology. In 2022, under the auspices of the PhD Sandwich Program of the Israeli Council of Higher Education and with the support of Fondazione Aldo Gini, Sarah spent six months in Israel collaborating with Dr. Ely Kovetz. Sarah loves to talk about her research and thus also works as a science communicator, mainly with children. She is very curious and loves to travel, take photos, and meet new people from different cultures.

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Ronnie Agassi Cohen

Ronnie Agassi Cohen is a PhD student in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Dr. Julia Rubanovich and Prof. Eyal Ginio.

Ronnie studies the history of the Ottoman Empire with a focus on the influence of Persian culture and literature on the development of Ottoman identity.

By analyzing historical works written in the Ottoman Empire in Persian and Turkish, her research identifies the intertextual connections between these texts and other prominent Persian literary works. She thus traces the links between historical writing in Persian and the development of Ottoman imperial identity during the second half of the fifteenth century. Ronnie hopes to offer a broader view of the cultural and intellectual changes following the transformation of the Ottoman state into an empire and present a unique perspective on cultural connections and identity formation in the pre-modern Middle East.

Ronnie grew up in Ra’anana and currently lives with her husband and child in Kfar Saba. She received her BA and MA in Middle Eastern and African history from Tel Aviv University. She is a member of the research group Past and Past Perfect at the Mandel Scholion Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to her research, in the past few years she has been part of “Great History in a Nutshell,” a voluntary project promoting public history education via social media. In her free time, she enjoys listening to podcasts and audiobooks, watching movies, and spending time with her family.

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Ronen Gottesman

Dr. Ronen Gottesman is a new faculty member in the Institute of Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ronen specializes in physical chemistry, material science, and the application of solar energy conversion materials.

Ronen’s research focuses on the intersection of plasma-based materials’ synthesis and fundamental studies of novel functional materials. He is currently researching heteroanionic semiconducting chemical compounds containing multiple anions. These materials may be used for solar energy-driven conversion of cheap, abundant resources, like water, into chemical fuels. As an Azrieli Fellow, Ronen will explore oxynitrides, a sub-class of heteroanionic materials that exhibit significantly enhanced properties, high performance, and increased stability under photoelectrochemical water splitting. He aims to develop innovative experimental systems to study oxynitrides’ structural properties, leading to scientific breakthroughs in sustainable development.

Ronen completed a BSc in biophysics at Bar- Ilan University. Before continuing with his PhD in physical chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Arie Zaban, he interned in South Korea with Prof. Nam-Gyu Park (a co-inventor of the perovskite solar cells). In his ensuing PhD research, he worked on perovskite-based solar cells – one of the first students in Israel to work on these captivating semiconductor materials. He continued in the field of solar energy conversion during his postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Solar Fuels at the Helmholtz Center for Materials and Energy in Berlin, where he established a specialized team for the development of “green” hydrogen. Ronen is married to Efrat, and they enjoy an active life with their two children, Yanai and Goni.

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Rolando Carbonari

Dr. Rolando Carbonari is an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fredy & Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Simon Emmanuel.

His central research interest is the application of machine learning and deep learning solutions to geological problems.

As part of his Azrieli- sponsored research, Rolando is working on automating digital rock analysis: a crucial step in subsurface characterization, which helps quantify rock porosity, permeability, and mineralogical composition. This is currently performed by analyzing digital data from microscope images and X-ray computed tomography. As this process is time-consuming and costly, Rolando is hoping to develop an automatic image analysis tool that will help to assess the mineralogy and quantify the quartz cement and porosity in sandstones and will be accessible as an open source software for all earth scientists.

Rolando was born and raised in Naples, Italy. He completed a BA and MA in geology with a specialization in geophysics at the University of Naples Federico II, where he then went on to pursue his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Rosa Di Maio, focusing on the application of electromagnetic geophysical methods. After a brief period as a data scientist in Milan, Rolando embarked on a two-year postdoctoral position at Oregon State University under the supervision of Prof. Adam Schultz, exploring the application of machine learning techniques to optimize geothermal drilling efficiency. When not engaged in research, Rolando enjoys reading, travelling, and cooking.

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Roee Leder

Roee Leder is a PhD student in the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While Roee’s research is supervised by Prof. Raz Kupferman, he also works closely with the experimental physics research group led by Prof. Eran Sharon – a cooperation that facilitates synergetic interaction between mathematics and its applications.

Roee’s research focuses on the mathematical foundations of powerful models that aim to explain complex mechanical systems.

Such models serve innovative theories within material science and are thus expected to yield new applications. The geometric and analytical foundations of these theories are lacking, however, which limits their scope and insight. Therefore, in addition to the intrinsic mathematical aspects of his research, Roee hopes to help solve a number of open problems in application.

Roee lives in Givatayim with his wife, Miriam. He earned a BSc and MSc in mathematics at the Hebrew University. When not researching, Roee enjoys crossfit and weightlifting, partying with family and friends, reading books, and quoting films. Each summer, he picks a mountain range for a hiking trip abroad, from which he returns rejuvenated and full of new ideas.

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Remi Casier

Dr. Remi Casier is an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemical and Biological Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Under the supervision of Prof. Gilad Haran, Remi employs single-molecule spectroscopy to study the ultrafast conformational dynamics of proteins.

Protein disaggregases are molecular machines that reverse protein aggregation, making them a vital component of cells and enabling their use in the development of therapeutics to combat neurodegenerative disorders. Remi aims to apply his background knowledge in polymer physics to study the dynamic interaction between a disaggregase and its substrates and thus enhance our understanding of their disaggregation mechanism on the molecular level.

Born and raised in Canada, Remi obtained his BSc and MSc in chemistry from the University of Waterloo. During his MSc under the supervision of Prof. Mario Gauthier and Prof. Jean Duhamel, Remi began his studies in polymer science developing a new technique to quantify the diffusion of polymer chains during the coalescence of latex films. Continuing with Prof. Duhamel for his PhD studies, Remi shifted his focus to the internal dynamics of biological macromolecules, particularly polypeptides. Employing the relationships he discovered between amino acid composition and local chain dynamics, he developed a blob-based model to provide experimentally supported insight into the complex phenomena of protein folding. When not working on his research, Remi enjoys travelling, spending time in nature, and trekking adventures

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