Professor Shlomo Aronson.A professor in the Hebrew University Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Science, Professor Aronson has been a visiting scholar at leading American institutions, including the University of California at Los Angeles, the Brookings Institution and the U.S. Library of Congress, where he lectured on the occasion of Israel's 50th anniversary.
Born in Israel during the British Mandate, Shlomo Aronson was educated at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Munich and the Free University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. A member of Hebrew University's faculty since 1968, Professor Aronson has fulfilled varied academic leadership roles, including as director of the Center of European Studies.
Professor Aronson's book, Hitler, the Allies and the Jews, received the 2005 prize of the Israeli Political Science Association for outstanding book in English, and the 2004/05 Sybil Milton Prize of the German Studies Association for an outstanding work on the Holocaust. His other works include: Conflict and Bargaining in the Middle East, Beginnings of the Gestapo System and The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East.
Howard (Chaim) Cedar, the Harry and Helen L. Brenner Professor of Molecular Biology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a member of the Department of Cellular Biochemistry and Human Genetics. An acclaimed molecular biologist, Professor Cedar conducted research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and as a U.S. Public Health Service Fellow, which set the stage for his lifelong career on the biology of gene expression. His groundbreaking work provided scientists with the first clues as to how genes are regulated at the molecular level. His discoveries opened an entire new field of research, and earned him the title of the "father of DNA methylation."
Immediately following his stay at the NIH, Professor Cedar, his wife and children fulfilled a lifelong dream and made Aliyah (1973). In 1999, he was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the field of biology. A member of the Israel Academy of Sciences, he has earned other notable awards, including the Hestrin Prize in Biochemistry and the FEBS Lecturer Award. He is the only recipient of an Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) Professorship, a position he has held since 1987.
Howard Cedar graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University.
Professor Raymond Kaempfer is the Dr. Philip M. Marcus Professor of Molecular Biology and Cancer Research at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Internationally recognized for his work in the area of bio-defense, Raymond Kaempfer received in 2005 the largest-ever National Institutes of Health grant to an Israeli researcher, $5.6 million. These funds are fostering his development of novel means to boost the human immune system response to agents of bioterrorism.
Professor Kaempfer taught at Harvard University from 1969-194 before joining The Hebrew University faculty. Appointed to the Dr. Philip M. Marcus Chair in 1983, he has served as chairman of Hebrew University's Graduate Program Committee on Biotechnology and as a member of its Steering Committee on Biotechnology. Since 1982, Raymond Kaempfer has been a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). He has served on the National Subcommittee on Manpower and Infrastructure in Biotechnology for Israel's Ministry of Science and Development.
A native of the Netherlands, Raymond Kaempfer earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Leiden and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a Van Leer Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Jane Coffin Childs Fellow at Harvard University, an NIH Special Fellow and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at M.I.T.
Professor Guy G. Stroumsa is the Martin Buber Professor of Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On sabbatical this year, he is a visiting professor at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and has been a fellow in the Hellenic Studies program at Princeton University.
Professor Stroumsa's specialties include the religious history of late antiquity in the Mediterranean and Near East. From 2003-2006, he was a Fellow of the Scholion Center for Interdisciplinary Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University as part of a research team investigating the cultural history of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire. He has been a visiting professor at universities throughout the world, and serves on editorial boards of scholarly journals in Europe and North America.
Professor Stroumsa received his B.A. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, his M.A.and Ph.D. from Harvard University and his Dr. h.c. from the University of Zurich. Among his books are: Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism (1996, revised ed. 2005), Barbarian Philosophy: the Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (1999), La fin du sacrifice: mutations religieuses de l'antiquite tardive (2005).
Professor Sarah Stroumsa, the Alice and Jack Ormut Professor of Arabic Studies on the Faculty of Humanities at The Hebrew University, teaches in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature and the Department of Jewish Thought. She served as the university's vice-rector from 2003-2006.
A Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of The Hebrew University, Sarah Stroumsa has held visiting positions at leading universities in Canada, Spain, France and the United States. Currently on sabbatical, Professor Stroumsa is a Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
Professor Stroumsa has extensively studied the history of philosophical and theological thought in Arabic in the early Islamic Middle Ages, Medieval Judaeo-Arabic literature, and Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain. She has received research grants from the Israel National Science Foundation, and directs a project cataloguing philosophical material in the Cairo Genizah.
Professor Stroumsa received her undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from The Hebrew University. She has authored many articles and books, among them a monograph on the first medieval Jewish philosopher, Dawud al-Muqammis (Leiden, 1989); The Polemic of Nestor thePriest (Jerusalem,1996); The Beginnings of the Maimonidean Controversy in the East (Jerusalem1999); Freethinkers of Medieval Islam (Leiden, 1999).
