Israel’s Technion Launches Unprecedented $1.8 Billion Campaign to Support University’s World-Changing Innovation

 

June 10, 2018

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has kicked off a global $1.8 billion, ten-year fundraising campaign – the largest and most ambitious initiative of its kind ever launched by an Israeli university.

The campaign will raise support for world-changing, life-saving innovation, and better prepare for the challenges and opportunities the digital revolution brings with it, and which are expected to be at the focus of global attention well into the second half of the 21st century.

The unprecedented effort was officially launched at the June 2018 Technion Board of Governors meeting, and will conclude in 2024, the centennial of the first Technion class. The campaign will deliver funding that amplifies the Technion’s outsized impact in sectors including the environment, sustainability, alternative energy and water conservation; health and medicine; artificial intelligence, information, and communication; quantum science, matter, and engineering; and advancing Israel security, leadership, and diversity.

Through the campaign, the Haifa, Israel-based Technion—Israel’s first university—will fund crucial areas of need such as fellowships and other student support, faculty recruitment and retention, research infrastructure, and capital projects.

“This campaign is truly global in nature,” said Prof. Peretz Lavie, President of the Technion. “Not only does it involve our societies around the world—including the UK, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, France, Israel, and the U.S.—but it will result in global benefits, such as better quality in soil, water, and air, easy-to-use sources for clean and renewable energy, engineering aid to developing countries, advancing breakthroughs in fighting cancer, and much, much more.”

“We live in the era of social entrepreneurship, when top philanthropists seek to maximize the return on investment for every single gift,” said Jeffrey Richard, CEO of the American Technion Society, whose donors have provided more than $2.5 billion for the Technion since 1940. “It is important that potential donors understand just how far their money goes at the Technion.”

The Technion has earned international recognition for its research in a myriad of fields, including regenerative medicine, aerospace, computer science, quantum engineering, nanotechnology, biotechnology, the life sciences and more. The institution has signed memoranda of understanding with more than 200 universities and research frameworks abroad, and last year inaugurated the Guangdong Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel’s first university campus in China, and celebrated the move of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute to its permanent home, the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York.

Ambassador Ronald S. Lauder has accepted the Technion’s invitation to serve as an honorary chair of the Technion Global Campaign. In October, Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder will host a special event at their home in New York to launch the Technion campaign in the United States. The event will be attended by the President of the Technion, friends of the Technion in New York and personal friends of the Lauder family.

“I feel a profound sense of commitment and responsibility to the Technion, Israel’s first and best school of engineering, the professional breeding house for so many of us, and the institution that has addressed – and that will continue to address – so many of the world’s challenges,” said Zohar Zisapel, the Israeli Chair of the Technion Global Campaign. “I’m honored to be a part of the Technion’s Global Campaign Committee, and to help ensure the future of this unique institution to the benefit of millions around the globe.”

“The standard practice of campaign communications among leading US universities is to soft launch the campaign and then make it public once one third of the campaign goal is secured,” said Prof. Boaz Golany, Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development at Technion. “When we launched the quiet phase of the campaign in October 2014, we estimated it would take four years to cross that threshold. We were glad to discover we were wrong. Thanks to the vision and generosity of our friends worldwide, we are already at a point in which we’ve raised more than 40% of our total goal of $1.8 billion.”

CBC Radio May 26, 2018

Listen here.

The issue of malnourished crops

Thanks to a fortuitous conversation between an Israeli chemical engineer who works on medical nanotechnology and his farmer friend, there’s a new way to deliver nourishment to nutrient-starved crops.

Avi Schroeder, the chemical engineer and cancer researcher from Technion — Israel Institute of Technology asked his friend what are the major problems facing agriculture today. “He said, ‘You know Avi, one of the major issues we’re facing is that in some of the crops we try to grow, we actually have a lack of nutrients. And then we end up not growing those crops even though they’re very valuable or very important crops.'”

This problem is only going to become more acute in many regions of the world as global population approaches eight billion people.

“Feeding them with healthy food and nutritious food is becoming a major limiting factor. And … the land we can actually grow crops on are also becoming smaller and smaller in every country because people need to build houses too. So what we want is to get actually more crops per hectare.”

The way farmers currently deliver nutrients to malnourished agricultural crops is very inefficient. Much of what is added to the leaves of the plant is wasted. Most of it washes away or isn’t taken up by the plants.

If plants don’t get the nutrients they need, their leaves start to yellow, their growth becomes stunted and they don’t produce as much food as nutrient-rich crops.

The way I imagine these packets are tennis balls, but the size of each one of these tennis balls is actually 1/1,000th the width of a human hair.– Dr. Avi Schroeder, a chemical engineer at Technion

When Schroeder heard about this problem, he immediately recognized the opportunity to apply advances made in medical nanotechnology for drug delivery to agriculture.

Using medical nanotechnology for agricultural purposes 

“We work primarily in the field of medicine,” says Schroeder. “What we do many times is we’ll load minuscule doses of medicine into nanoparticles — we’ll inject them into the patient. And those nanoparticles will actually be able to detect the disease site inside the body. That sounded very, very similar to the problem the farmers were actually facing — how do you get a medicine into a crop or a nutrient into a crop and get it to the right region within the crop where it’s actually necessary.”

The nanoparticles Schroeder developed are tiny packages that can deliver nutrients — any nutrients — that are placed inside.

“The way I imagine these packets are tennis balls, but the size of each one of these tennis balls is actually 1/1,000th the width of a human hair. So they are about 100 nanometres in diameter.”
Therapeutic nanoparticles penetrate leaves and deliver nutrients to agricultural crops. (Avi Schroeder/Technion — Israel Institute of Technology)

These nano-sized “tennis balls” are made of phospholipids, which are very similar to molecules that make up the cell walls in our bodies, and also those of plants. In this case, the raw materials came from soybean plants.

Schroeder tested nanoparticles containing either magnesium or iron nutrients on tomato plants grown in soil missing these nutrients. What he discovered, he says, amazed him.

“We know today, when you spray ordinary nutrients or different chemicals on plants, usually out of each 1,000 molecules that are sprayed on the plant, only one will actually penetrate deeply into the plant. Here what we found is out of each of 1,000 molecules that were sprayed, we actually had between 250 to 350 molecules that actually penetrated the plant.” – Dr. Avi Schroeder, Technion  — Israel Institute of Technology.

Results of their study

“We were totally shocked when we saw the data,” says Schroeder.

“We know today, when you spray ordinary nutrients or different chemicals on plants, usually out of each 1,000 molecules that are sprayed on the plant, only one will actually penetrate deeply into the plant. Here what we found is out of each of 1,000 molecules that were sprayed, we actually had between 250 to 350 molecules that actually penetrated the plant.”

Not only did a good proportion of these nutrients make it into the plant, but the plants that received the nutrients turned from yellow to green and grew into healthy plants.

Schroeder sees this technology as a “game changer.”

With this nanotechnology, he says, “We’ll start seeing crops that grow higher, give more produce, and also more than that, the produce itself — the fruits and vegetables that will be coming out of these crops — will have a higher nutritional value because they grew in an environment where they had all the nutrients they actually needed.”

Technion UK wishes to appoint a Chief Executive to run its UK office which is located in Mayfair

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa is Israel’s Nobel Prize winning university of science and hi-tech research and one of the world’s most prestigious and highly ranked technological institutes. It plays a vital role in every aspect of Israel’s life, from defence to computer science and medical research, with global reputation and impact.

The Chief Executive’s objectives are to raise funds for Technion, interpret the vision of Technion within the UK and promote support for and awareness of Technion and its importance to Israel within the scientific, academic and business world. Achieving these objectives will require sound strategic and leadership skills, familiarity with the UK Jewish community and the wider business community and a strong relationship with the State of Israel.

For more information and to apply for this position contact Tony Bernstein, Executive Director on 020 7495 6824.

Applications and CV to info@technionuk.org by Thursday 17th May 2018.

Israeli researchers kill a cancerous tumour with synthetic cells

 

 

Israeli scientists and researches have been at the forefront of extensive studies on cancer and cancer treatment over the past several decades. With the disease being the main cause of death in Israel, universities, medical centres, hospitals, and labs have taken the lead in developing innovative care plans and undertaking sophisticated research to help advance understanding and knowledge of cancer, of which there are over 100 types, and for which there is no known cure.

Israeli scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have successfully treated a cancerous tumour, eradicating its cancer cells using a “nano-factory” – a synthetic cell that produces anti-cancer proteins within the tissue, the Technion announced in February.

Synthetic cells, the prestigious Haifa-based university says, “are artificial systems with capabilities similar to, and, at time, superior to those of natural cells.”

After experimenting with the synthetic cells in a lab, the technology was tested on mice where the proteins produced by the engineered particles eradicated the cancer cells once they reached the tumour, the Technion said.

Assistant Professor Avi Schroeder at the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Technion who co-led the research with doctoral student Nitzan Krinsky said, “By coding the integrated DNA template, the particles we developed can produce a variety of protein medicines. They are modular, meaning they allow for activation of protein production in accordance with the environmental conditions.

“The artificial cells we’ve developed at the Technion may take an important part in the personalised medicine trend – adjustment of treatment to the genetic and medical profile of a specific patient,” he added.

Harnessing light and gold for drug-delivery in treatments including cancer 

Also at the Technion, Israeli scientists announced this year that they have developed technology that enables drug delivery to target diseased tissue only, using light and gold particles, which can be used to make cancer treatments, for example, more effective.

The system harnesses the particles to specifically target the affected tissue, like a tumour, rather than dispersed throughout the body which is often harmful, the university said. “A prime example of this is the use of chemotherapy drugs, which work to block cell division, causing hair loss and bowel issues in cancer patients (hair growth and waste elimination both depend on rapid cell turnover),” the Technion said in a statement.

The scientists are aiming to tackle head and neck cancers specifically, because “a major problem in the treatment of those cancers is their resistance to traditional radiotherapy,” Aron Popovtzer, a clinical professor of oncology at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Tel Aviv University, who led the study, told the Times of Israel in February.

“From previous studies, we knew that gold helps increase the intensity of the radiation absorbed by tumours,” he went on. “But if you inject gold particles into a person, it can go anywhere. The key was to get the gold to settle onto the tumours.”

The non-invasive drug-release method uses a unique polymer coating that contains nanoscale gold particles along with the drug itself, the Haifa-based university said. The drug only releases when a light shines on the gold particles, causing the polymeric coating to melt. The drugs are injected into the bloodstream but only activated at the targeted location, using the external light on the gold particles to find the location of the affected tissue.

Continue reading about the other leading breakthroughs in cancer research and detection on NoCamels.

Words taken from the article published on NoCamels on  April 12, 2018.

LONDON, 6 March 2018 – Technion UK is proud to host the Ron Arad lecture in London. Presenting at the Royal College of Physicians, Professor Hossam Haick from the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion in Israel and an expert in the field of nanotechnology and non-invasive disease diagnosis, delivered a lecture on the developments into his pioneering research into nanoarrays that he is using to identify disease biomarkers as a novel diagnostic tool.

Prof. Haick is an Israeli-Christian Arab scientist and engineer and is the pioneer of the Electronic Nose – a medical device that can sniff out 17 specific diseases in a person’s breath, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Tuberculous, Diabetes and Lung Cancer. As an active innovative scientist, he has attracted the attentions of the world’s billionaires such as Bill Gates and he has been in collaboration with Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in the diagnostics of diseases.

At the lecture, Prof. Haick said, “Every disease has a unique signature, known as what we call a ‘breath print’. The challenge is to bring the best science we have proven into reality by developing a smaller device that captures all the components of a disease that appear in the breath.’

Prof. Haick continued to demonstrate how current advances in his research has the potential to identify diseases though sensors in mobile phones and wearable technology. From analysing 3700 volunteers, the technology under development at The Technion also has the potential to predict the occurrence of cancer in the future, based on results of healthy people that are currently under the diagnosis with the breath analysis.

He continued, “We cannot develop this technology in Israel without developing the best science. The integration between the software, machine learning and academic intelligence will make a critical change in the early detection and prevention of cancerous diseases.”

Daniel Peltz OBE, Chairman of Technion UK said, “We’re delighted to welcome Prof. Haick to London to showcase this latest progressive innovation in cancer research from The Technion.’

“Technion students undertake scientific research which is powering Israel’s rapid high-tech growth; our students are brilliant at challenging, creating and inventing – skills which the Prof. Haick exemplifies. The marvellous technology and advancement in non-evasive disease detection, discoveries in nanotechnology to help detect disease from someone’s breath is the future of disease detection.”

 

Queensland Bauxite (ASX: QBL) has dived into the autoimmune disease field after its subsidiary Medical Cannabis inked an agreement to provide funding for research on treating, and potentially curing, multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases with medicinal cannabis.

The agreement was made with Research and Development Foundation at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Under the agreement, Medical Cannabis’ wholly-owned subsidiary Medical Cannabis Research Group will provide US$3 million over three years to the Research and Development Foundation to fund investigations into treating autoimmune disease symptoms and halting disease progression with medicinal cannabis, initially focussing on multiple sclerosis.

In return, Medical Cannabis will own the rights to any products developed from the study.

Prof David Meiri from the Technion Institute’s biology facility will head up the investigation. Prof Meiri has discovered a synergistic relationship between the human genome and cannabis and this will underpin the research. Prof Meiri and his research team will focus on matching effective cannabis extracts and compositions that can regulate or alter immune function.

Targeting the immune system

The overall objective is to develop a cure for multiple sclerosis by strengthening the immune system.

Prof Meiri said current treatments can have wide-ranging side effects from flu-symptoms to development of fatal malignancies.

“These side effects highlight the need to identify more specific therapeutic targets that can be effectively modulated without inducing such adverse reactions,” Prof Meiri said.

He added that while current treatments reduce relapses, they fail to halt the disease.

“Cannabinoids have been largely characterised for their action in the immune system and were tested in several in vitro and in vivo disease models for inflammation (a common symptom of numerous autoimmune diseases),” Prof Meiri said.

He said his research team had developed a novel way to analyse metabolomics and cannabis plants’ chemical compositions that have been neglected in previous research.

“As far as we know, we are the only lab in the world today that have these abilities of comprehensively profiling the cannabinoid composition for a variety of cannabis strains and also to be able to purify sing phyto-cannabinoids and create ‘suspect profiles’ for examination in different types of studies,” Prof Meiri added.

Autoimmune diseases

According to the Australian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy, autoimmune diseases impact about 5% of Australians and New Zealanders.

In addition to multiple sclerosis, other autoimmune diseases include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, celiac disease, type 1 diabetes and a host of other lesser known illnesses such as vasculitis, polymyalgia rheumatic, and sjogren’s syndrome.

Queensland Bauxite claims there about 80 known autoimmune diseases with about 50 million people in the United States believed to be suffering from one.

With no known cure, treatments have been limited to anti-inflammatories, corticosteroids, pain medication, physical therapy, surgery, immunosuppressants and stem cell research.

To date, medicinal cannabis has been used to treat pain in those suffering from autoimmune diseases, with lower side effects than morphine-based drugs.

“This is a very logical avenue of research, especially when the only semi-legal cannabis medicine in the world was developed for the treatment of multiple sclerosis,” Medical Cannabis technical director Andrew Kavasilas stated.

He added a lot more knowledge had been gathered since this cannabis-based pain medicine was first developed.

“There’s an incredible amount of work being done in Israel which has capitalised on many opportunities due to their government’s willingness to allow medical cannabis use by well over 100,000 people, while the professional scientific research catches up to break down all this valuable evidence,” Mr Kavasilas added.

Meanwhile, Queensland Bauxite executive chairperson Pnina Feldman said the company was “privileged” to be working with Prof Meiri and his research team on a “ground-breaking” opportunity.

“Everyone knowns someone with an autoimmune disease in one form or another, and there could be no more satisfying outcome, ore more important work, than making the lives of these people not only easier, but hopefully enabling respite from symptoms and cures for disease,” Ms Feldman said.

She added that medicinal cannabis benefits combined with medical technology is opening new horizons for treating illnesses worldwide.

Medical Cannabis appoints ‘Amazon John’ to the board

Medical Cannabis has strengthened its team after appointing John Easterling to its board.

Nicknamed ‘Amazon John” Mr Easterling was given the name due to his experience working with Amazon plants and gem stones.

He is also married to former singer-actress and cancer research advocate Olivia Newton-John, who herself has battled breast cancer in the past.

By early afternoon trade, Queensland Bauxite’s share price had lifted almost 2% to A$0.057.

 

Article written by Lorna Nicholas and published in Small Caps on February 26, 2018

Researchers developed an innovative technology that allows a drug to be released only in the diseased tissue for which it is intended.

Researchers at Haifa’s Technion- Israel Institute of Technology have developed a non-invasive way to use light to release drugs slowly to the exact spot in the body that needs them. Advances in medical science over the past century have led to the development of effective drugs for various diseases in general and for cancer in particular. However, random dispersion of drugs throughout the body reduces their effectiveness and causes damage to healthy tissues. This is why cancer patients treated with chemotherapy often suffer hair loss and bowel problems characterized by rapid cell turnover, which is affected by the drug.

This is the background to the worldwide effort to develop smart methods to transport the drug to its target without contact with healthy tissue.

Now, an article in the journal ACS [American Chemical Society] Applied Materials & Interfaces, has revealed a breakthrough in those methods has been achieved at the Technion’s Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering.

Doctoral student Alona Shagan and Prof. Boaz Mizrahi developed the innovative technology that allows the drug to be released only in the diseased tissue for which it is intended.

This is done using unique polymer packaging with trapped gold nanoparticles. When the packaging is exposed to light, the gold particles heat up and melt, allowing the drug to be released.

According to Shagan, “Photo- triggered materials play a major role in many biomedical applications, but despite their enormous potential, many of them are not applicable due to two reasons: the toxicity of the polymer packaging itself and damage caused by the high-energy [shortwave] light.”

The Technion researchers have developed the unique packaging so the elements will be softened by the projection of long-wave (near-infrared) light.

The main advantage of near-infrared light is that it penetrates the body’s tissues without harming them. “We developed a material here with varying melting points, which allows us to control fusion by wavelength,” added Mizrahi. “The advantage is that our packaging is made of polymers approved by the FDA, so we think the path to clinical implementation will be relatively short.”

The new technology can be used for purposes other than drug delivery, such as internal and external injury occlusion, temporary fixation of tissue during surgery, biodegradable scaffolding for making tissues for transplantation and even as self-healing tissue for medical and other uses. According to Mizrahi, “In this article, we focused on the concept of how we can produce the material to suit the desired mechanical and physical properties that we need.”

Shagan – who grew up in Netanya and served in the IDF’s elite 8200 unit – is currently working toward her doctorate, having completed an undergraduate degree at the Technion’s Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering.

“Science and engineering have attracted me since childhood,” she said. “When I was in my first year at the Technion, I was already sure that I would go for advanced degrees.” This summer, Shagan will fly to Boston to further study materials for use in medicine in the context of those being developed in Haifa.

Mizrahi earned a BA at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Pharmacy in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem. Already while studying for a second degree, he began developing technology to transfer drugs to the target tissue without damaging healthy tissue. After receiving his doctorate, Mizrahi went on to post-doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and four years ago joined the Technion as a faculty member in the biotechnology and food engineering department.

“You could say that instead of buying a ready-made cake, we buy flour and sugar and control the properties of the product,” he said. “Our inspiration comes from nature, because it is an enormous laboratory that has gone through billions of years of development. There are very effective solutions to various challenges, so it is certainly worthwhile for us to learn from or at least be inspired by it, certainly when we work on applied developments.” According to Shagan, “Photo- triggered materials play a major role in many biomedical applications, but despite their enormous potential, many of them are not applicable due to two reasons: the toxicity of the polymer packaging itself and damage caused by the high-energy [shortwave] light.”

The Technion researchers have developed the unique packaging so the elements will be softened by the projection of long-wave (near-infrared) light.

The main advantage of near-infrared light is that it penetrates the body’s tissues without harming them. “We developed a material here with varying melting points, which allows us to control fusion by wavelength,” added Mizrahi. “The advantage is that our packaging is made of polymers approved by the FDA, so we think the path to clinical implementation will be relatively short.”

The new technology can be used for purposes other than drug delivery, such as internal and external injury occlusion, temporary fixation of tissue during surgery, biodegradable scaffolding for making tissues for transplantation and even as self-healing tissue for medical and other uses. According to Mizrahi, “In this article, we focused on the concept of how we can produce the material to suit the desired mechanical and physical properties that we need.”

Shagan – who grew up in Netanya and served in the IDF’s elite 8200 unit – is currently working toward her doctorate, having completed an undergraduate degree at the Technion’s Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering.

“Science and engineering have attracted me since childhood,” she said. “When I was in my first year at the Technion, I was already sure that I would go for advanced degrees.” This summer, Shagan will fly to Boston to further study materials for use in medicine in the context of those being developed in Haifa.

Mizrahi earned a BA at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Pharmacy in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem. Already while studying for a second degree, he began developing technology to transfer drugs to the target tissue without damaging healthy tissue. After receiving his doctorate, Mizrahi went on to post-doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and four years ago joined the Technion as a faculty member in the biotechnology and food engineering department.

“You could say that instead of buying a ready-made cake, we buy flour and sugar and control the properties of the product,” he said. “Our inspiration comes from nature, because it is an enormous laboratory that has gone through billions of years of development. There are very effective solutions to various challenges, so it is certainly worthwhile for us to learn from or at least be inspired by it, certainly when we work on applied developments.”

 

 

 

Article written by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, published in The Jerusalem Post on February 26, 2018

Six “astronauts” have entered a structure designed by Technion students in order to simulate life on Mars. The building was erected near the town of Mitzpeh Ramon as a first step in the establishment of a space simulation center.

Technion students designed a construction to help simulate human life on Mars as part of a unique course held at Technion’s Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, led by architects Moshe Zagai and Alon Shikar. The building, named HAB01, was built in Mitzpeh Ramon at the 13th Ilan Ramon International Space Conference. Last week six “astronauts” including Zagai and Shikar entered it in order to learn about life under Mars-like conditions and perform various experiments.

Mars has always aroused great curiosity amongst mankind. In the ‘60s, the Mariner 4 spacecraft photographed Mars, and since then many more voyages have been conducted. Furthermore, many believe that Mars will be the next location of human habitation in space, and the likes of NASA and SpaceX are preparing to land the first expedition on the Red Planet.

However, conditions on Mars are not friendly to humans: remarkably low temperatures (around 60 degrees below zero), strong ultraviolet radiation, and an atmosphere low in oxygen. These require serious preparation and a thorough understanding of the potential future living conditions on Mars.

The special course that was held at Technion focused on construction on Mars, and its main goal was to design a structure to house ten people. The course facilitator, Alon Shikar, said that the project requires in-depth understanding of sociological, psychological, technical, and functional aspects. Due to the complexity of the project, which took place within the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, students from other Technion faculties were also invited to the course, including Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering.

The building, designed in cooperation with the Davidson Institute of Science Education of the Weizmann Institute of Science, is the first step in establishing a space simulation center near the Ramon Crater.

 

THREE ISRAELI UNIVERSITIES IN TOP 50 ASIA UNIVERSITY RANKINGS

Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology all ranked in the top 50 in the 2018 Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings released this week.

 

Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology all ranked in the top 50 in the 2018 Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings released this week.

Tel Aviv University ranked 25th in Asia, down three spots from last years, making it the highest-rated Israeli institution in the Asia rankings, while the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ranked 27th and the Technion came in 41st.

Bar Ilan University just narrowly missed the top 50 and came in 51st.

Also in the rankings: the University of Haifa ranked 100th while Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba was No.104.

These are the sixth annual Asia University Rankings published by the Times Higher Education weekly magazine, which this year ranked the top 350 institutions in Asia based on the same criteria as the World University Rankings – but with modifications to better reflect the characteristics of Asia’s universities.

The rankings judge schools based on 13 performance indicators across all areas including teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

The National University of Singapore was ranked No. 1 for the third year in a row, while five of the top 10 universities were from China or its special administrative region of Hong Kong.

“The results show that more than two decades of focused investment in excellence [by China] is paying off,” Phil Baty, editorial director of global rankings at Times Higher Education, said.

Tsinghua University and Peking University – two leading Chinese institutions that have collaborations with Tel Aviv University – ranked second and third, respectively.

Tel Aviv University and Tsinghua University in Beijing established the XIN Research Center, a $300 million joint center for innovative scientific research and education in nano-technology and nano-medicine.

Tel Aviv University has also signed an agreement with Peking University to establish a center in the areas of food security and food safety.

Overall, China has 63 universities in the rankings, many of which made significant progress in this year’s rankings.

 

 

By Lidar Gravé- Lazzi

Article published in The Jerusalem Post, 8 February 2018