Meet the Laureates of the 2019 Blavatnik Awards in Israel
On April 7, 2019, three Israeli scientists were honored at the second annual gala and ceremony for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in Israel. The Blavatnik Family Foundation, in collaboration with The New York Academy of Sciences and The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (IASH) awarded each researcher $100,000 for their extraordinary achievements in Life Science, Chemistry, and Physical Sciences and Engineering. Get to know the three laureates as they share their experiences, inspirations, and what it means to be a Blavatnik Award winner.
Dr. Michal Rivlin is a visual neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Blavatnik Award Laureate in Life Science discovered that cells in the adult retina can exhibit plasticity in their selectivity and computations. Her discoveries raise fundamental questions about how we see and has the potential to change the treatment of retinal diseases and blindness as well as the development of computer vision technologies.
Dr. Moran Bercovici, an analytical chemist at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and a Faculty Fellow at the University Texas at Austin is the Chemistry Laureate. His multidisciplinary research in microfluidics, electric fields, heat transfer, chemical reactions, and biology has the potential to develop cutting-edge innovations that could be utilized in adaptive optics and microscale 3D printing, among many other fields.
Dr. Erez Berg is a condensed matter theoretical physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He was named the 2019 Physical Sciences & Engineering Laureate. Dr. Berg was recognized for his landmark computational method to study an important phenomenon, called metallic quantum criticality, which is commonly seen in many quantum materials. His research will help to speed up the implementation of these materials in next generation electronics, including quantum computing, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and superconducting power lines.