1994: B.Sc. in Physics and Material Science and Engineering.

1995: Joined NRC-Negev. 

2000: M.Sc. in Material Science and Engineering.  Thesis: "U6Fe and U6Co Compounds". Supervised by Prof. Moshe Dariel, BGU. 

2006: Ph.D. in Material Science and Engineering.  Thesis: “Interface Interaction and Wetting Phenomena in Boron Carbide-Liquid Metals Systems".
Supervised by Prof. Naum Frage, BGU.

2008 - 2009: Sabbatical - visiting scientist at UC-Davis, California, USA. Guest of Prof. Alexandra Navrotsky. Subject of study: "Thermochemistry of ThO2-Ln2O3 (Ln=La, Y) with Fluorite structure".

2009-today: Researcher, Materials Department, NRC-Negev. 

​

• B.A. 2001, Physics (Technion) 
• B.Sc. 2001, Materials Engineering (Technion)
• M.Sc. 2003, Materials Engineering (Technion) 
• Ph.D. 2007, Materials Engineering (Technion)  

After graduating from the Technion in 2007 (Ph.D.), Yaron joined the department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University (Evanston IL, USA) as a Marie Curie post-doctoral research associate in the framework of the International Outgoing Fellowship (IOF) program of the European Union. During these three years Yaron specialized in atom probe tomography (APT) and density functional theory (DFT)-based methods and their applications in materials science. In 2010 Yaron came back to Israel as a Senior Researcher at the Technion Research and Development Foundation (TRDF), and in 2011 was appointed as a Faculty at the Materials Science and Engineering Department. His current research activity focuses on design of new thermoelectric materials for energy harvesting applications. Yaron is a member of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), the Materials Research Society (MRS), the American Physical Society (APS), and the Israel Physical Society (IPS).

Major research interests

Thermoelectric materials;
Atom-probe tomography (APT);
Computational materials science based on the density functional theory (DFT);
Nickel-based superalloys;
Diffusion and mass transport in solids and short-circuit diffusion;
Phase transformations in materials;
Energetics of interfaces in crystalline solids.

Nurit Ashkenasy received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University (Israel) in 2000. After a postdoctoral research at the same department, she moved in 2001 to the Scripps research institute in La Jolla California to work as a research associate in the group of Prof. Ghadiri. In 2006 she joined the Materials Engineering Department and the Ilse-Katz Institute for Nanoscience and Technology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Nurit has published 34 papers in peer review journals and has been awarded with several awards, including a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship.

Nurit's research interests focus on the design and preparation of artificial proteins for electronics applications. To this aim the proteins are designed both to template devices' assembly and to control their electronic properties. Her group also uses these specifically designed proteins to study the basic phenomena of charge transfer in proteins. In parallel, Nurit and her group work on the development of solid state nanopore devices for therapeutic and sensing applications.

Maytal Caspary Toroker received her BA degree in molecular biochemistry (2004) and a direct-track PhD degree in theoretical chemistry (2009) at the Technion. After a postdoctoral period at Princeton University funded by the Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship from the European Union FP7 (2010-2013) program, she joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an Assistant Professor in 2013. She has a background in several fields of theoretical and computational chemistry, including wave-packet dynamics and ab-initio calculations. Her research interests are in computational materials science that involves electronic structure calculations of metal and semiconductor materials. Specifically, she focuses her research on characterizing and optimizing material properties for solar energy conversion applications, including photovoltaics and photoelectrochemical cells. She received several awards for excellence, including L’Oréal-Unesco-Israel Award (2010), New England Fund (2009), Sara Lee Schupf Post-Doctoral Award (2008/9), and the Levi Eshcol Scholarship (2007-9).

Oswaldo Dieguez is a faculty member at the new Department of Materials Science and Engineering of Tel Aviv University, where he heads the Atomistic Simulation of Materials group. The research of the group focuses on the development and application of computational methods to understand the behaviour of materials, and to design new materials with tailored properties. Among the materials of current interest to the group there are ferroelectrics and multiferroics.  
These are materials with an electric polarization that can be switched by a field, a property that lends itself to technological applications in memories, sensors, and actuators. Before coming to Israel, Oswaldo got his PhD degree in Physics from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain), he did postdoctoral stays at the University of Cambridge, Rutgers University, and MIT, and he was a research scientist at the Institut de Ciencia de Materials de Barcelona.

Dr. Yaniv Gelbstein leads the thermoelectric group and chairs the Discipline of Electronic Materials at the department of Materials Engineering, BGU. In parallel, Dr. Gelbstein also chairs the Graduate Student Committee in the Unit of Energy Engineering at BGU.
Dr. Gelbstein is an active researcher in the area of thermoelectrics, has published over 30 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and regularly invited to present his research results in international conferences. The aim of his research is to develop highly efficient thermoelectric materials, using both single crystal growth and advanced powder metallurgy approaches. So far very high thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT) values of up to 2 were obtained using both optimal electronic doping (including generation of resonant states for achieving of the Fermi Level Pinning effect) and generation of nanostructures for minimization of the lattice thermal conductivity. Recently, thermodynamically driven nano-features methods were undertaken for reduction of the lattice thermal conductivity, utilizing known physical metallurgy approaches, such as the spinodal decomposition reaction. All of these approaches are motivated by the desire to develop mechanically stable highly efficient thermoelectric alloys for practical power generation applications. 

Diana Golodnitsky received her M.Sc. from the L. Ya. Karpov Physicochemical Scientific  Research  Institute,  Moscow.  She received the  Ph.D. degree  from  the  State  Technological University, Kazan, Russia. Until 1991 Diana Golodnitsky was engaged in the field of the research and development of the innovative materials, electrodeposition and electroless technologies for Aircraft Techniques. Prof. Diana Golodnitsky has been involved in lithium-batteries field since 1992.  Her work  has  covered  several  topics  related  to  electrochemical energy  storage,  3D-micro-  and  nano-battery  architectures, including  advanced  cathode  and  anode  materials,  gel  and solid  polymer  electrolytes.  Her  scientific  interests  focus,  in addition, on electrochemistry of metals and alloys, materials characterization for advanced energy technologies using XRD, SEM,  EDX,  XPS,  TOF  SIMS,  DSC,  and  TGA  methods.  She has co-authored 97 papers, three book chapters, and more than 180 conference publications; she also holds 13 patents. Prof. Diana Golodnitsky has been a supervisor of 11 PhD students. Since 1997 Diana Golodnitsky is a PI of 16 international and competitive grants.  Diana Golodnitsky has international collaborations with leading scientists in US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Poland, and Netherlands. She is a reviewer of 7 professional journals and the member of Editorial Advisory Board of The Open Electrochemistry Journal.

Carol Handwerker is the Reinhardt Schuhmann, Jr.  Professor of Materials Engineering, and Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette.  Dr. Handwerker's research program at Purdue is focused on Pb-free interconnects, particularly for high reliability, military, and aerospace electronic systems, on innovative processing strategies and innovative technologies for next-generation printed electronics and microelectronics, on stress relaxation processes in thin films, and on integrating sustainability in the design of new electronic materials, processes, and products.  Prior to joining Purdue in August 2005, Dr. Handwerker served as Chief of the Metallurgy Division at NIST for the last nine of her 21 years at NBS/NIST.  In her role as Division Chief, she led technical programs aimed at developing the materials measurement and standards infrastructure important to US industrial competitiveness and infrastructure protection.   She has been assisting the US microelectronics industry in the worldwide conversion to lead-free solders for printed wiring boards by developing the link between many fundamental science concepts and high volume electronics manufacturing.  

Shmuel Hayun is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Materials Engineering at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He holds a B.Sc. degree in Physics and in Materials Engineering from the Ben- Gurion University of the Negev. He received his Ph.D. degree in Materials Engineering from the Ben Gurion University for his study of the Inter-relationships between the Static and Dynamic Mechanical Properties and the Microstructure of Reaction Bonded Boron Carbide Composites. Shmuel Hayun completed his postdoctoral studies at UCDavis, where he studied the thermochemistry of nanomaterials (measurements of interfacial energy and gas phase – surface interactions) and rare earth titanates including the energetics of order – disorder transformations. His research focuses on understanding the effect of external electric fields on the thermochemistry and defect chemistry of nano oxides by combining thermochemistry with classical powder metallurgy

David Jacob is an alumnus of Technion Management Department and a Ph.D from Bar-Ilan University under the tutelage of Professor Aharon Gedanken. Then he joined Prof. Doron Aurbach group and develop knowledge in electrochemistry and energy storage devices and published papers on Li-ion battery and develop a patented technology on industrial scale process in use of CNT in Lead Acid batteries. At present he is the CEO of IsraZion Ltd a company dedicated to the manufacturing of novel materials for energy storage devices.

Ernesto Joselevich is an Associate Professor at the Department of Materials and Interfaces of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He received his B.Sc. (summa cum laude, 1991) and Ph.D. (1997) degrees in Chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard (1998-2000) before joining the Weizmann Institute in 2001. His research focuses on the organization of nanotubes and nanowires, their integration into functional nanosystems, and their characterization by mechanical, electrical and optical measurements at the nanometer scale. Prof. Joselevich pioneered the "guided growth" approach for the generation of ordered nanotubes and nanowires directed by surfaces. He has also studied the torsional behavior of carbon and inorganic nanotubes, which could be the basis for useful nanoelectromechanical systems. He has published more than 50 papers in prestigious journals, including Science, Nature and Nature Nanotechnology, with over 4,000 citations. He enjoys extensive international collaborations with Germany, USA, Japan and Brazil, and has received numerous awards, including the 2007 Israel Chemical Society Excellent Young Scientist Prize.

Dr. Louisa Meshi completed her Ph.D. in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel, specializing on structure determination of intermetallic compounds using a combination of powder X-ray diffraction and electron crystallography methods. During her Ph.D. studies she received two prestigious awards: The Lev Margulis prize of the Israeli Society for Microscopy and the Wolf prize for excellent doctoral research. Following postdoctoral research in Bristol University, UK, during which she specialized in the study of structural defects using electron microscopy, Dr. Meshi has joined the BGU Materials Engineering Department.

In 2008 she was elected as a chair of Special Group of Interest on Electron Crystallography (SIG4) of the European Crystallography Association and at 2011 as a member of the Commission on Electron Crystallography of the International Union of Crystallography. As part of this activity, Dr. Meshi has organized several international schools on electron crystallography in Europe.

The research theme of Dr. Meshi’s group is determination of atomic structure of novel materials applying state of the art methods of electron crystallography. In 2012, Dr. Meshi received the Krill Award of the Wolf foundation for excellence in scientific research.

Prof. Oded Millo did his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University, studying collective and localized electronic excitations on metal surfaces. His Post-Doc research, performed at Yale University, focused on    quantum-transport (mesoscopic physics), in particular Universal Conductance Fluctuations and conductance fluctuation in chaotic billiards. He is now a full professor at the Racah Institute of Physics, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His current research focuses on combined local-probe and transport studies of superconductivity, in particular proximity-effects at ferromagnet -superconductor interfaces,   nanostructured semiconductor systems, both single particles and their arrays, and solar-cell materials.  Millo’s group was the first to map the quantum-confined level structure in semiconductor nanocrystals and image the corresponding wavefunctions, and the first to find evidence in the tunnelling spectra for induced triplet-pairing superconductivity in ferromagnets proximity coupled to superconductors. Oded Millo was among the founders of the Hebrew University Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and serves as the Head of Physics Teaching at the Racah Institute of Physics.

The laboratory of Dr. Nessim at Bar Ilan University focuses on the synthesis of nanostructures. The main goals are (1) to better understand the complex mechanisms of growth of carbon nanostructures such as nanotubes, nanofibers, and graphene, (2) to functionalize the synthesized structures, and (3) to integrate them as electrodes for more efficient batteries and supercapacitors. 

For instance, the synthesis of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) on substrates is particularly challenging and involves many process parameters influencing multiple inter-related reactions between the precursor gases, the catalysts, and the layers below the catalyst. Although many recipes have been developed in the last decade, the complete growth mechanism still eludes us. The aim of the presentation is to convey the state of the art of the synthesis of various carbon nanostructures and in to illustrate the main chemical-physical mechanisms at play with examples from current research.
 
Dr. Nessim joined the faculty of chemistry at Bar Ilan University in 2010. He holds a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT, an MBA from INSEAD (France), and Masters in Electrical Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano and from the Ecole Centrale Paris. Prior to his PhD, Dr. Nessim spent over a decade in high-tech industry and consulting across Europe, USA, and Israel.

Yossi Paltiel been both in the high-tech leading groups and in the academy and in this sense he has the capability and experience to use scientific knowledge to realize working devices. 
Yossi began by earning a physics and mathematics degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Then, moved to the Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute where he did his MSc and PhD.  At 2002 he joined a start-up company as the head of a quantum devices group. Returning to a more research-oriented environment Yossi joined the Solid State Physics group at Soreq NRC in a tenure track researcher position in 2004 and received tenure in 2006. In 2008, during a 1 year sabbatical he was one of the core founders of a new startup company, and served as the head of the electro optical team. Since July 2009, Yossi has been leading the Applied Physics Department Quantum Nano Engineering group at the Hebrew University. His group’s goal is to establish a way to incorporate a quantum mechanics into a room temperature "classical" computation scheme. This will provide quantum control at nanometer scale distances, while maintaining the physical characteristics of available devices. Yossi was promoted and received tenure in 2012.

2013 - present: Associate Professor, The Institute of Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

2006–2012: Senior Lecturer. The Institute of Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

2003-2006: Postdoc, University of California at Santa Barbara.

1997-2002: Ph.D. student, Materials and interfaces, The Weizmann Institute of Science

1995-1997: M.Sc. Student, The Institute of Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

1991-1994: B.Sc. Student, The Institute of Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Amos Sharoni performed his undergraduate studies and PhD at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Oded Millo, Dr. Sharoni studied electronic local properties of high temperature superconductors by scanning tunneling microscope. Following, Amos conducted a Post-doc in the group of Prof. Ivan Schuller in UC San Diego, where he worked a couple of subjects. Mainly, spin injection in lateral devices (spintronics) and properties of transition metal oxides (such as the vanadium oxides), and the correlation between local properties and macroscopic measurements. His expertise include thin film PVD and nanolithography.  Dr. Sharoni joined Bar Ilan University in 2010 where he continues work on these subjects.

Roy Shenhar received his BSc in Chemistry and Computer Science in 1995 and his PhD in Chemistry in 2002, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He turned to polymer science in his postdoctoral research, and spent 3 years as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He returned to Israel in 2005 and worked as a Zeff Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion, where he applied block copolymers to the fabrication of advanced field-effect transistors. In 2006 he joined the Institute of Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011. His research centers on the development of self-assembly strategies for nanotechnological applications based on self-organizing polymers as scaffolds and templates.

Roni Shneck was born in Isreal, earned his degrees at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He was an officer in the metallurgical laboratory of the IDF during 1980-1985 and research assistant (post-doc.) at the university of Virginia on 1995-6. Since 1993 he is a lecturer in BGU at the department of materials engineering. His fields of interest are mechanical properties of materials, role of elastic energy in the microstructure of materials, thermodynamics and high temperature materials.

Eli Sloutskin has completed his Ph.D. at Bar-Ilan University (Physics Department) in 2007, studying the physics
of liquid surfaces. During his Ph.D., done at the group of Prof. Moshe Deutsch, he has employed tightly-focused synchrotron radiation 
to study the physics of surface-induced ordering at the sub-nano scale in alkanes and their derivatives, ionic liquids, and salt solutions.

Following his graduation, Eli has joined the group of Prof. David A. Weitz (Harvard) as a Rothschild and Fulbright postdoctoral research associate. Working at this group, Eli Sloutskin has diverged into modern confocal microscopy of colloids, micron-sized particles suspended in a molecular liquid, studying crystal nucleation and demonstrating that the experimental early nuclei adopt a wide variety of complex shapes, instead of being spherical as assumed by most theoretical models; accounting for these shapes allowed the nucleation rates to be reproduced with no free fitting parameters. 

Eli returned back to Israel in 2009. His team at Bar-Ilan University (Physics Department) studies dense colloidal systems, such as the fluids of simple colloidal ellipsoids and amorphous solid sediments of colloidal spheres, employing colloids to gain a deeper insight into the physics of collective phenomena in fluids, glasses and crystals.

Born in Israel, Prof. Daniel Hanoch Wagner grew up in Brussels, Belgium, where he earned a License in Physics from the Free University of Brussels (1975). He was awarded an MSc degree in Materials Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1977), and, after serving in the Israel Defense Forces, completed a PhD there in 1982. He spent three years (1982-1985) at Cornell University as a postdoctoral associate and lecturer. Prof. Wagner joined the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Materials Research (now the Department of Materials and Interfaces) in 1985. He holds the Livio Norzi Professorial Chair in Materials Science.

His current scientific interests include the micromechanics of novel man-made materials such as carbon nanotubes and nanocomposites, and the mechanics of biological composite materials such as bone and dentin, as well as cell adhesion. Being extremely intricate, biological composites have the potential to inspire radically new synthetic composite designs, for example in the field of ballistic impact-resistant structures.

Wagner is the author of 230 papers and several chapters in books. He was the elected Chairman of the Gordon Research Conference on Composites in 2000, in Ventura, California, and the recipient of the Gutwirth Prize in 2010.

Roie Yerushalmi is a member of the Institute of Chemistry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are related to the design and synthesis of hybrid nanostructures for photocatalysis and for harvesting of light energy as renewable and sustainable energy source. The research activities in his group extend from the development of new surface chemistries, the synthesis and surface modification of hybrid nanostructures, nanostructure array assembly, and comprehensive characterization of complex nanostructured systems by application of analytical methods.
Roie is the recipient of several prizes including the Kennedy prize, the career development award by the Human Frontier Science Program. Roie received the prestigious ERC young scientist starting grant in 2011. Roie is a member of the Israel Young Academy, a newly formed organization for the advancement of young scientists and science in Israel, formed by the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Dr. David Zitoun is a Senior Lecturer in the department of chemistry at Bar Ilan University (Israel) and a member of the Energy Center at the Bar-Ilan Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA). He has held a position of senior lecturer at the University of Montpellier (France) for five years.

DZ has a MSc degree of Materials Science from the Ecole Normale Superieure (France) and has graduated as a PhD student with Dr Chaudret (Universite Toulouse 3, France) in Coordination Chemistry. DZ has been awarded a fellowship for a post-doctoral position in Prof. Peidong Yang Nanowire Research Lab at the University of California Berkeley. DZ is leading a research group investigating advanced materials for energy applications ; Li-ion batteries, fuel cells and other catalysts. His work has been highlighted in 46 publications, 4 patents and 10 invited conferences.

More information on www.zitounlab.com