It’s Nobel Week in Sweden

Congratulations to Technion professor Dan Shechtman, who is receiving the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry this week in Sweden.

Starting Wednesday, December 7th, ATS Director of Communications Tova Kantrowitz will be covering the events of Nobel week from Sweden. Please check back here for updates.

 

From Slide Rules to Satellites

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               In honor of the 100 year anniversary of the laying of the Technion cornerstone, we are sharing the amazing stories of Technion innovators and leaders.

April 2012 marks 100 years since the laying of the Technion cornerstone. Caught up in Technion nostalgia, I cracked open historian Carl Alpert’s Technion: The Story of Israel’s Institute of Technology, and found an interesting reflection.

The piece was quoted by Arie Rosenfeld, a Technion alumnus who helped launch the digital printing giant Scitex, one of Israel’s first global start-ups.

Reminiscing and looking ahead simultaneously, Arie said: “when I graduated from the Technion in 1965, it didn’t have satellites, protein

Arie Rosenfeld

engineering, … supercomputer toolkits, active vision, eco-homes … membrane technology… medical imaging … cellular phones and phrases like cutting edge and state-of-the art.” The list went on for nine lines.  “But it had plenty of vision,” he added.

I tracked down the former Scitex CEO, to hear more about the days when Israel’s main export was oranges, and the Technion was still a fairly small school on top of a big hill.

“In my days at the Technion, we were using a central computer and slide rules,” says Arie. “No one had desktops or calculators. And of course there were no cell phones.” To put the era in context: Michael Dell, whose name is practically synonymous with personal computers, was born that year. The late Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc., whose birthday, oddly enough is the day after Dell’s, was just 10. And the Technion had not yet established five of its current departments, including those of Medicine and Computer Science.

A Hungarian immigrant, Arie moved to Israel when he was six. His parents, who did not speak a word of Hebrew, came with nothing – “just two kids and two suitcases,” he says. They moved to Kibbutz Kfar Szold in the Upper Galilee, but unaccustomed to communal living, soon moved to Acco, then Haifa.

After attending private high school in Haifa, Arie entered the Technion. “I don’t remember ever wanting to study anything but engineering.” The work was rigorous, the environment competitive, and most important “we were trained to take risks, to dare to think out of the box,” he says. “We came through the Six Day War, and before that we helped in building a nation. Everything was possible.”

Arie thought of studying aeronautics. But worried that his opportunities would be limited to a career in government or the Israel Air Force, he went into electrical engineering. “Now there are hundreds of companies to apply to. Then there were five or six. Most of my friends went to work for the Ministry of Defense.”

Graduating from the Technion, Arie served in the Ordnance Corps, where his main task was to update to western standards the Russian tanks that were captured from the Egyptians during the Six Day War. Finishing his service in 1968, he started looking for a job.

“I received good offers, big names,” including IBM. But he turned them down to join a four-person start-up, founded just three months earlier – Scitex. “I was already married and my family thought I was doing a stupid thing. But I liked the idea of starting something new. I was young, so if it didn’t work, I could always go back to IBM,” he says.

Arie’s first assignment at Scitex was to build a large tracking platform that would be used to mount cameras and telescopes photographing targets in the sky. “It was very challenging, very interesting.” The defense ministry gave Scitex two or three such projects, and the company gradually added engineers – most Technion grads. “This was how we got started.”

Soon however, the fledgling company realized they couldn’t depend on government work to turn a profit. “Sometimes they paid, sometimes they didn’t, and often they changed their specs midstream,” recounts Arie. Going after non-military work, they attracted jobs in imaging technologies – the first of which was designing patterns for knitting textiles. It was innovative and successful, and launched the group into printing fabric. “By the late 1970s, we moved into printing paper, and this is how Scitex became famous,” he says.

Producing products, systems and equipment for the graphics design, printing and publishing markets – which can all be done today on one’s desktop – Scitex is often hailed as Israel’s first high-tech company. “Every Jewish mother wanted her kids to work for Scitex,” Arie recalls.

At its peak, in early 1992, the company was worth close to $2 billion and so influential that following an announcement of weak earnings, Israel’s stock market dropped about 10 percent. “President Ezer Weizmann, called me up and said ‘do something about the market,’” Arie remembers. “What can I do? Scitex isn’t even traded in Israel, but on NASDAQ,” Arie told him. But Weizmann shot back, “it doesn’t matter. Just do something.’”

Arie went on to head up Scitex’s activities in Europe, and later in 1988, worldwide, and left the company in 1995. Since then, he has invested in start-ups and assisted half-a-dozen companies, taking them over at an early stage and turning them into viable businesses. He also mentors Technion graduates who are launching tech start-ups. Scitex has been sold in parts to Eastman Kodak and Hewlett-Packard.

He and his wife split their time between Brussels and Israel, where they have a son and grandson. Uniquely poised to compare entrepreneurship in Europe vs. Israel, he says: “Europeans are not trained to take risks. If they start a company and they fail, they can never start another one. In Israel, you can start, you can fail, you start again and nobody holds it against you. This is the mentality. And it is very good.”

– Jennifer Frey, American Technion Society

Q&A With the Program Leader of The Technion American Medical School

The Technion American Medical School (TeAMS) offers North American students a fully American medical school curriculum. It offers all classes in English, and complete preparation for a career in the United States or anywhere else. But this American-style med-school education takes place against a backdrop no American school can match: the richness of Israeli culture and the wide ranging scientific resources of the Technion.

We recently caught up with Professor Andrew J. Levy, who was named TeAMS Program Leader earlier this year, for a Q&A session to find out more about the TeAMS program.

Can you briefly describe the TeAMS program? How does it differ and what are the advantages as compared to other American Medical Schools in Israel?

Dr. Andrew Levy

The TeAMS program provides a four-year medical degree program at the Technion Faculty of Medicine.  The program accepts approximately 25-30 students from the United States and Canada each year.

One of the main advantages of the TeAMS program is its small class size, which provides more personal attention to each student and allows greater participation in class. This more intimate setting has also let us set up a system whereby each student has a one-on-one interaction with a specific faculty member for all four years of their tenure here. The faculty member serves as a student advisor for all academic and non-academic issues.

A second advantage of the TeAMS program concerns research. All of our students are provided the framework to carry out medical research at one of the laboratories in the Technion Faculty of Medicine. Furthermore, any student that wishes to carry out such research will get a small stipend to do this work. Typically, about one half of the students end up publishing an original paper as a result of this work. The quality of this research is generally high, as evidenced by the program’s peer-reviewed grant support, as well as publication in medical journals.

One last advantage that I would like to mention involves clinical rotations. We have recently been selected by the American Association of Medical Colleges to be one of 15 international medical schools to participate in a program involving an exchange of students between participating U.S. institutions.  This will facilitate the ability of our students to obtain clinical rotations at prestigious U.S. schools during their fourth year. We are the only Israeli medical school with this affiliation.

What are the main reasons TeAMS students choose to study at the Technion, as opposed to a school in the states? When they graduate do they have to pass the same licensing exams as their American counterparts?

About one half of our students choose to study at the Technion after having been accepted by a U.S. medical school. In some cases this is due simply to a desire to be in Israel.

Our students take the same exams needed for licensure as any student studying in the U.S. Therefore, our graduates become licensed to practice medicine in the U.S., as well as Israel.

What types of residencies can TeAMS graduates get in Israel and the U.S.? Can you please explain the matching programs and how TeAMs students fare?

TeAMS student Karyn Winkler gains valuable clinical experience while studying at the Technion

All TeAMS students are eligible for obtaining residencies in the U.S. or in Israel. The matching program in the U.S. is a system whereby a medical student selects where he or she will perform postgraduate training (residency) in the US.  There are about 30,000 spots in the U.S. at all of the different hospitals, and each year about 45,000 students apply for these positions.   The hospitals select the students based on their exam scores, clinical performance and letters of recommendation.    Our students have obtained residencies at outstanding institutions in the U.S., a trend we expect to only grow stronger.

Do TeAMS students typically stay in Israel upon graduation or do they return to the U.S.?

Each year 2-3 students decide to stay in Israel upon graduation. The rest return to the U.S.  However, one interesting fact is that many graduates who go to the U.S. for residency training return to Israel upon completion.

You are the new director of TeAMs. Can you share a bit about your own background and your vision for the future of the TeAMs program?

I was born and raised in the U.S. I attended Yale University for my undergraduate education, receiving a bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. I received my M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Johns Hopkins University. I trained in internal medicine at Hopkins and then in Cardiology at Harvard.

The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine

I made Aliyah with my wife and 5 kids in 1997. I run a basic molecular cardiology laboratory at the Technion, supported by NIH and other international granting agencies. There are about 15 students, post-docs and fellows working in my lab.  I am currently Full Professor at the Medical School, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and Director of the TeAMS program.

My vision for TeAMS is that we will help each student reach his or her maximum potential — providing a challenging yet supportive environment in which each student will receive personalized attention.  Technion graduates are innovators, and I believe they will be leaders in the next generation — armed with the skills to bring cutting-edge technology to the bedside to improve patient care and reduce health care costs.  This is no pipedream. I know our students can do this; we just need to provide them the tools.

Eliezer Morganstern: From Chabad to Technion

During the heat of exam period (literally and figuratively), I managed to meet with one of the Technion’s busiest students. Eliezer Morganstern, also known as Ezzy. Ezzy is a second year mechanical engineering student, the regional director of the Lone Soldier Center in Haifa and the North, and an active member of Engineers Without Borders at the Technion. He helps run the Chabad on campus and is working on becoming a rabbi.

Ezzy and the troops

In addition to all of the above responsibilities, Ezzy is married and has three kids, the youngest of whom is four months old. His wife is an officer in the Air Force working on environmental policy; the two of them met when they were both in officer’s training school during their service in the Israeli army. When I asked him how he does it all he said, “if you want something done, give it to a busy person,” and laughed. Then he added in a slightly more serious tone, “It’s not easy.”

Ezzy was born in a Chabad community and attended yeshivah until he was 18 years-old. He had always wanted to come to Israel and join the army, even though it is not a typical path for someone from his community. “I think it had something to do with my dad’s volunteer work during the Yom Kippur War. For as long as I can remember I wanted to be in the army.”

Ezzy told all of his rabbis and friends about his plans for years. “Most people didn’t believe me. But because I had been saying it for so long, when I finally graduated and told everyone I was leaving they couldn’t really argue with me.” So Ezzy boarded a plane, with a one-way plan, to go to a place he had never seen before. “I knew I was staying. I wanted to go to the army and always wanted to be in Israel even though I had never been here before. When I got on the plane, I knew I was staying; and I haven’t gone back for over a month since.”

Ezzy and his four-month-old

He is the first Chabad member to join the army, where he began as a volunteer and ended up as an officer. Since his service, there have been many more Chabad students to come to Israel and serve in the army, 10 or 15 for each draft. When he came, even the yeshivah track for service was not attended by Chabad members. When I commented that he pioneered this new trend, he shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t say I’m a pioneer, but I hope I made things easier for other people.”

A big chunk of Ezzy’s schedule is taken up by the Lone Soldier Center, a program that helps new solders who don’t have a support base in Israel. “I love it. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to be able to help other people in the same shoes (I was once in).” Ezzy helps take care of the new recruits, going to kibbutzim to talk to them and encourage them to seek out the center if they ever need anything.

At home in the graduate dorms at the Technion, Ezzy and his wife, Michal, host Shabbat dinners frequently with big groups of students and celebrate every chag with the community there. “The whole building is families, and everyone hangs out at one park in the middle of the buildings. It’s like a kibbutz in the middle of the city with a nice mix of non-religious and religious people. The community is really great.”

Ezzy on the Technion campus.

So what could this Chabad, Lone Soldier activist and father be interested in pursuing at the Technion? “Robotics. Right now it’s mostly defense robots. In the next few years, though, robots are going to be much more popular with civilians. Small changes will come into our lives and we’ll learn to accept them. They aren’t all androids.” It’s easy to forget that Ezzy only learned at yeshivah growing up and didn’t learn anything beyond basic math until he was an adult. But he laughs that off. “I love it. It’s very hard and challenging and it keeps me on my toes, which is good.”

I have to wonder if he is ever not on his toes.

– Noa Ben Harav

The 2011 TechnoBrain Competition

A competitor examines his creation.

Last week was the Dr. Bob’s TechnoBrain competition, an annual mechanical engineering contest in its ninth year. This year the competition consisted of designing, building and launching a yo-yo from a 98 foot crane. The requirements for the competition stipulated that the yo-yo had to climb back up 66 feet of rope to qualify and then additional scoring was given for successive climbs. The grand prize was 10,000 shekels to the winner, 5,000 to the runner-up and 3,000 to third place (approximately $3,000, $1,500, $900 USD, respectively).

The competition was started by Niv-Ya Dorban while he was a student at the Technion. Technically he was an ‘atudai,’ or a student soldier on a scholarship track with the military. Even with his busy schedule, he still found time to establish and organize this competition. When he was killed in 2003, the competition continued to be held in his honor.

A Yo-Yo is dropped from the crane.

Most of the students worked in teams, using materials they found around the house. A quick survey of participant’s projects revealed many day-to-day circular objects turned into giant yo-yos. There were more than a few bicycle wheels, tires, and even a fan grate. It was interesting to see designs that fell outside the box as many students took chances with their design. There was one design that wasn’t round at all and instead featured two large metal X’s connected at their cross point by a bar. Some of the yo-yos had whimsical decorations and released confetti when they dropped.

There was a familiar face in the group of participants: Gilad Doron, who I met in the wind tunnel lab, also built a yo-yo. His design was simple, built out of bicycle wheels and climbing rope. He added weight to the outside of the wheels to help the yo-yo build momentum fast. Gilad pointed out to me other teams who tried creative ways to give their yo-yos an edge: Two teams placed water receptacles on their traditional yo-yos to add disposable weight. He explained that they wanted to use water to pull the yo-yo down fast and then spill, allowing the now-lighter yo-yo to rise faster and farther.

The event was a real crowd pleaser.

Not all of the participants were Technion students. A team of eighth graders entered the competition as “Team Maxwell” with their teacher from the Vardi Center in Rishon L’Zion. They spent two weeks building the yo-yo based on Maxwell’s pendulum which is a classic example of a nearly-elastic collision where kinetic and potential energy are barely lost. The design calls for two nylon cords mounted on the axel of a wheel. While this works well indoors on a small scale, a gust of wind at the wrong time tangled this yo-yo design before it could reach its full potential.

The crowd cheered as each yo-yo beat the breeze to rise up again. The biggest issue that seemed to plague many of the designs was balance. With the slightest wobble, the yo-yos lost a lot of their momentum and began twisting, ultimately failing to rise up again. Several of the yo-yos didn’t launch fast enough, getting struck by the trap doors of the launch pad as they fell.

Winner Eyal Cohen and his yo-yo.

Finally, it was the smallest yo-yo, designed by a lone first-year that blew everyone away. The tiny disk rocketed from the crane when it was released, rising and falling many times as it secured the win for its designer. Eyal Moshe Cohen designed his yo-yo to act like a car’s flywheel so that it would be able to run back up the rope many times. He accepted his prize holding the etched metal yo-yo in his hands. The announcer was excited to announce the winner, as Eyal’s grandfather had served as the announcer’s battalion commander in the Yom Kippur War.

Focus on Students: Leaders of Tomorrow

Here are some pictures supplementing the Technion USA Summer 2011 edition. The photos illustrate a day in the life of Technion graduate students Alina Shapira and Daniel Hurwitz, and Technion American Medical School students Karyn Winkler and Michael Star.

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Technion Students Decompress on “Student Day” AKA Yom HaStudent

Performers light up the night on the main stage.

Last week was the Technion’s annual student festival, Yom HaStudent. The event was put on by the Technion’s student union, a huge and incredibly influential group of students that works hard all-year to improve life on campus. The two-day festival featured music, games, restaurants, and more.

I sat down with Yael Avital, the head of the student union (and part of the 2011 ATS student delegation), who told me all about the work the union does on campus. “The student union is a very important part of life at the Technion, more so than most students realize,” she said. Students only know about 20% of what we do,” she tells me. “We are involved in everything, from the small issues like how much it costs to copy or fax something, to the biggest production like Yom HaStudent.”

Students enjoy the pool at the sportsclub.

Yael has been involved with the student union since her first year at the Technion. Today, as the head, she manages an organization with over 350 employees and oversees “Effect,” the company for commercial activities on campus. “If Coca-Cola wants to advertise [on campus], all that money goes back to the students…. All the money that comes in goes out.”

Yael Avital is head of the highly active Student Union.

While much of the funds go towards the massive organizational effort of Yom HaStudent, they also go to subsidizing student expenses, offering affordable tutoring to students, and financing the student union. Yael ran for her position on a platform of strengthening the financial foundation of the student union, and, today, it is highly effective and very successful. “She’s pretty amazing,” another student union representative told me at Yom HaStudent. “I don’t know how she gets everything she does done, but it’s impressive.”

On the main Yom HaStudent stage, bands and artists such as Balkan Beat Box, Beri Sakharoff, and Moshe Peretz performed. During the afternoon, many students escaped the heat on shuttle buses down to a local sports club to swim in the pool. Other activities included a salsa room, a disco hall, and Arab music concerts. The variety of activities was astounding.

A carnival game draws the interest of Technion students.

After nearly a full year of classes— and with finals not too far around the corner— it was clear that this was a welcome reprieve from their hectic schedules. The student union organizers were incredibly efficient throughout the day reminding me, once again, that I was dealing with very professional students. As Yael had told me before, being part of the student union “can be a full time job, even a full and a half.”