Site includes 13 buildings, 29 classrooms, and over 60 laboratories; 3,000 students expected to attend over the next decade.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology became the first Israeli university to open a campus in China.

On Monday, the Guangdong Technion Israel Institute of Technology opened in Shantou, in the Guangdong province on the southeast coast. The university is a partnership between the Haifa-based university, the Li Ka Shing Foundation, and the Guangdong provincial and Shantou municipal governments.

The school will offer undergraduate and graduate programs in engineering and science. Some 3,000 students are expected to attend the school in its first decade. The campus includes 13 buildings, 29 classrooms, 14 teaching laboratories and 55 research laboratories.

“[W]e welcome in a new era of cooperative research between Israel and China in science, engineering and the life sciences,” Technion President Peretz Lavie said at the Monday ceremony, according to a statement.

The Shantou institute’s chancellor, Li Jiange, said the China-Israel collaboration was mutually beneficial.

“China offers the Technion a broad platform to realize its academic excellence. We in turn must learn from the Technion and Israel what innovative thinking is,” Jiange said.

In 2013, the Li Ka Shing Foundation donated $130 million to the Israeli university, with some of the money to be used to fund the Guangdong campus. The Guangdong provincial and Shantou municipal governments also contributed $147 million for construction and initial operations, and provided land for the campus.

In September, the Technion, in collaboration with Cornell University, opened a high-tech teaching and research center on New York’s Roosevelt Island.

By JTA, published on Times of Israel, 19 December 2017

Leon Siciliano and Reuters, Business Insider UK

Seeing a rat scurry by would send many people running away screaming, but researchers at Israel’s Technion institute of technology were joyful when they saw one particular rodent walking.

The rat, once paralysed with a completely severed spinal cord, had weeks earlier undergone pioneering surgery, as part of research headed by Technion and Tel Aviv University.

Professor Shulamit Levenberg, Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Faculty at the Technion, told Reuters: “In this project we managed to induce spinal cord regeneration following complete injury to the spinal cord, and this was to the extent where the animal that was totally paralysed started to walk again and also regained sensory perception.”

Levenberg’s team, together with Professor Daniel Offen’s researchers from Tel Aviv University, used stem cells from an adult human’s mouth and placed them on a sponge-like, biodegradable scaffold, which was transplanted into the site of the rat’s spinal cord injury. This effectively created a pathway circumventing the injured area so that instructions from the brain could reach the rest of the body.

“It was amazing to see the animals starting to walk after 2-3 weeks. They started to walk almost as normal and we were very excited to see this,” she added.

The research was launched following a request from Israel’s Foundation for Spinal Cord Injury in an attempt to tackle the common, yet incurable bodily damage.

In the U.S. alone, some 17,000 patients suffer spinal cord injury each year. Despite rehabilitation protocols and other neuronal transplants, a full recovery of a severed spinal cord has yet to be accomplished in humans.

Levenberg hopes her research will change that, but warns that there is still a long way to go before it reaches the stage of clinical trials in humans.

“These are very early studies and we still don’t know how it will work in humans,” she added.

“This is the big challenge: to treat spinal cord after full transection because we know that spinal cord can not recover by itself,” added Professor Offen, who heads Tel Aviv University’s Neuroscience Lab.

“What we tried to do was to take human stem cells, did some modification and differentiation, and transplanted it with some bio material, some polymer, that was put inside the spinal cord,” he explained.

About 40 percent of the animals that received the treatment regained movement and sensory perception, said Levenberg.

Some regeneration of the spinal cord was seen in the rest of the animals, but not to the extent of full recovery, she added.

The rats were treated shortly after the injury, which allowed the treatment to be effective, Professor Offen estimated. In older injuries, where the part of the spinal cord that was cut off by the injury has had time to atrophy, this solution may not show such positive results.

In the future, he hopes this treatment could be part of every operating room’s basic equipment, allowing doctors to treat spinal injuries as soon as possible.

“Our vision is that in the surgery room there will be frozen cells that once a patient come after full transection of the spinal cord, these cells could be transplanted into the lesion site.”

In an experiment publicised in 2012, paralysed rats were helped to walk involuntarily over obstacles by electrically stimulating the severed part of their spinal cord, in research carried out at Switzerland’s EPFL. Professor Gregoire Courtine’s team announced similar results with monkeys last year.

Photo Credit: Professor Shulamit Levenberg, Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Faculty at the Technion

Technion leads the world in providing students with digital skills, according to a Times Higher Education survey.

The newest Times Higher Education survey ranks the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa as the world’s top academic institution in terms of preparing students for leading positions in the digital revolution.

Survey respondents from global companies ranked University College of London second and Korea Institute of Science and Technology third. The only American school in the top 10 was Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in sixth place.

Times Higher Education Survey for 2017
Times Higher Education Survey for 2017

“This is a badge of honor for Technion,” said Technion President Prof. Peretz Lavie. “In recent years, Technion has placed considerable emphasis on training its students to meet the changing needs of the digital revolution. As a result, Technion’s interdisciplinary research is expanding and advancing by leaps and bounds, in a process integrating life sciences and engineering.”

Lavie said various advanced learning technologies are being implemented at Technion, including MOOCS (massive online open courses) in various languages, as well as a “flipped classroom” approach emphasizing self-study using technologies such as augmented reality.

“In addition, the strengthening of Technion’s global standing, reflected by the Technion branches in New York and China and by strategic partnerships worldwide, helps us attend to the changing needs of global industries,” he added.

The survey’s authors note that global academic institutions are increasingly evaluated according to the employability of their graduates, and that in some places around the world, government support for institutions is linked to graduate success in the labor market.

Aerospace engineers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed and patented a process that can be used onboard aircraft while in flight to produce hydrogen from water (including waste water on the plane) and aluminum particles, safely and cheaply. The hydrogen can then be converted into electrical energy for inflight use. The breakthrough could pave the way for less-polluting, more-electric aircraft that replace hydraulic and pneumatic systems typically powered by the main engine.

The groundbreaking work was reported in a recent paper published in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy.

This technology is expected to drastically reduce the CO2 emissions as well as make the aircraft quieter for those on-board. The system will be able to generate electricity for use on board more efficiently that relying on the main engines.

NanoPack is a Technion led project to introduce nanotechnology-based antimicrobial packaging to enhance food safety and reduce waste that was awarded €7.7 million by the EU as a part of HORIZON 2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.

NanoPack aims to develop and demonstrate state-of-the-art antimicrobial packaging solutions for perishable foods based on natural nanomaterials that will prevent food-borne illness outbreaks and reduce food waste caused by early spoilage.

“NanoPack will demonstrate a solution for extending food shelf life by using novel smart antimicrobial surfaces, applied in active food packaging products,” said Dr. Ester Segal, NanoPack’s coordinator and associate professor at the Technion. “NanoPack will enhance food safety for consumers by significant growth inhibition of food-borne microbes, which in turn will prevent food-borne illness outbreaks and early spoilage.”

EU Awards €7.7 Million to NanoPack Project to Introduce Nanotechnology-Based Antimicrobial Packaging to Enhance Food Safety and Reduce Waste

Brussels, Belgium, January 16, 2017– The European Union (EU) has awarded the international NanoPack consortium €7.7 million to develop and demonstrate a solution for extending food shelf life by using novel antimicrobial surfaces.

The three-year project is aimed at demonstrating, validating and testing food-packaging products with antimicrobial surfaces based upon natural materials. NanoPack will address scientific, technological, economic, safety.

NanoPack, which is led by the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, is funded as part of HORIZON 2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.

She added that NanoPack would help reduce the staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted each year, which cause major economic loss and significant harm to the world’s natural resources.

“We intend to present better performing, safer and smarter products that will position Europe as the leader in food nanotechnology and smart antimicrobial packaging while increasing competitiveness and growth,” Dr. Segal added.

The active polymer films developed by NanoPack exhibit broad-spectrum antimicrobial properties unmet by existing state-of-the-art materials, which include currently used nanomaterials such as silver particles, which have raised health concerns of toxicity and microbial resistance.

Applying the power of nanotechnology, the project will employ polymer composites based on natural Halloysite Nanotubes (HNTs) as reliable and safe carriers, capable of tailored release of bioactive payloads. Due to their size, HNTs are unable to migrate from the food packaging into food. Maximizing safety, HNTs in the NanoPack food packaging slowly release

minute amounts of potent, volatile, natural and EU-approved essential oils into the packaging headspace. The oils exhibit both antimicrobial and anti-fungal properties and can be tailored to inhibit growth of most food-borne microbes.

The NanoPack consortium is comprised of 18 partner organizations – leading industrial and research institutes – from Belgium, Austria, Norway, Spain, Israel, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

NanoPack project concept

NanoPack will hold its opening conference at the facilities of Bio Base Europe (BBEU) in Ghent, Belgium on January 24–26, 2017.

About NanoPack

NanoPack is an EU-funded project, which aims to develop and demonstrate a solution for extending food shelf life by using novel antimicrobial surfaces applied in active food packaging products.

NanoPack intends to develop, scale up and run pilot lines in operational industrial environments to manufacture and validate antimicrobial polymer films that are commercially feasible and accepted by retailers and consumers alike.

Researchers at the Technion Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering have developed a device that can diagnose neurological disease by tracking eyelid motion. The eyelid motion monitor technology (EMM) was tested on 100 healthy subjects to collect a base line of blinking patterns. This was then used to diagnose individuals with blepharospasm dystonia, a disease characterised by involuntary contraction of the muscles responsible for closing the eyes.

The hope is that this technology will be used in regular eye tests to diagnose all diseases that a expressed neurologically. The researchers are testing the technology in the diagnosis of dementia and Parkinson’s and hope to develop to cover Thyroid eye disease, Ptosis and other cranial nerve palsy.

What Do Your Eyes Say? Device Can Diagnose Diseases Based on Eyelid Motion

HAIFA, ISRAEL (October 15, 2017) – Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering have developed a device that can diagnose diseases by means of an eyelid motion monitor (EMM). The project was published recently in Graefe’s Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology.

Already in its developmental stages, the device has won several international awards, and was ranked in the top 20 in the Texas Instruments Innovation Challenge (TIIC) – Europe Design Contest. Over the past two years, the device has been used in clinical trials at Haemek Medical Center in Afula, Israel.

The device was first developed by Technion Prof. Levi Schachter and doctoral student Adi Hanuka, who began working on it as an undergraduate. Hanuka continued working on it during her graduate studies, with the help of a team of students working under her supervision.

“Eyelid motion provides us with meaningful information about the health of a patient,” explained Hanuka. “This motion can indicate not only eye diseases, but also neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, and autoimmune diseases such as Grave’s. We developed a device that can be installed on the standard refraction glasses used in eye tests, at the request of Dr. Daniel Briscoe, Chairman of the Haemek Medical Center Department of Ophthalmology.”

Glasses are fitted with a hardware and software system that monitors and interprets eyelid movements. With approval of the Ethics Committee Regulations for Research Work Involving Human Participants, measurements of approximately 100 subjects have been collected in order to define the eyelid motion patterns (blinking speed and frequency) of a healthy person. Eyelid motions were analyzed using a signal-processing algorithm written by students Tal Berkowitz, Michal Spector, Shir Laufer, and Naama Pearl.

The team first examined blepharospasm dystonia, a disease characterized by involuntary contraction of the muscles responsible for closing the eyes. The researchers found a statistically significant quantitative relationship between a person’s eyelid pattern and the disease, which means that the device could be used to diagnose it. The system was also used to examine the effect of Botox injections, the conventional treatment for the disease, and it was found that within 15 minutes contractions decrease and the blinking pattern begins to match indices that exist among healthy people.

The researchers are also gathering information about other groups, including patients with dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

“Along with designing the product for purposes of commercialization, we are working in several directions: developing the device as a platform for multidisciplinary research on various topics such as the effect of emotions on blinking patterns; eyelid communication amongst the paralyzed; and automatic diagnosis through machine learning and based on a computerized comparison between the specific monitoring and an extensive database,” said Hanuka.

According to the researchers, the device has the potential to diagnose every disease that is expressed neurologically, including many ocular and systemic such as Ptosis, Thyroid eye disease, Parkinson’s disease, Myasthenia Gravis, and neurologic diseases such as third and seventh cranial nerve palsy.

Graph (CORR): Blinking speed as a function of the amplitude of motion. Green – a patient with blepharospasm dystonia blinking at very high speed.

Last month Prof. Boaz Golany, Technion’s Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development opened the Technion-Poalim Data Science Center (TPADS). The new centre aims to harness the data provided by Bank Hapoalim with researchers at Technion to develop the banking technologies of the future.
Banking and financial technology is a rapidly developing sector and Technion is forming a unique partnership to allow collaborative development of theories and data analysis tools that will directly improve banking services and technology.

Technology in the Service of the Future of Banking

Technion and Bank Hapoalim inaugurate TPADS, a joint research center

“This is a definitive and optimistic occasion, in which a major bank partners with a leading technological university to connect the world of economics with the digital domain,” said Prof. Boaz Golany, Technion’s Vice President for External Relations and Resource Development, at the inauguration of the Technion-Poalim Data Science center (TPADS).

The new Center was established by Bank Hapoalim and Technion’s Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, with the aim of harnessing new technologies for the development of the bank of the future. Researchers from Technion and bank analysts collaborate to address the major challenges of the technological-banking world. According to Prof. Golany, “This pairing between Bank Hapoalim and Technion may be strange at first glance, but it is based on the innovation that characterizes both partners. The digital revolution changes perceptions that we have become accustomed to and will cause banks to look completely different within a decade. Academia, like the financial world, must adapt itself to the digital revolution.”

The cooperation between Bank Hapoalim and Technion is carried out by the bank’s innovation division, and as part of a joint initiative with the Technion’s Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management led by the Dean of the Faculty, Prof. Avishai Mandelbaum.

Avi Kochva, Deputy CEO of Bank Hapoalim and the Head of the Innovation Division, said at the ceremony, “A year ago we announced this collaboration and I am pleased that we have reached this festive day of inauguration. The bank of the future is a proactive one, committed to understanding customers’ needs and adapting to them. A key part of this is the development of information and data analysis, and therefore we partnered with Technion – to strengthen these capabilities of ours.”

“This is an innovative project based on intra-organizational entrepreneurship and creativity on both sides,” said Prof. Mandelbaum. “This is a partnership between equals – the bank provides data and full partnership in analysis and Technion develops advanced theories and related data analysis tools, so as to apply to the bank’s data. Progress made in the past year has been significant, and we continue along the delineated path to benefit from the fruits of our joint research.”

The Center is led by Profs. Avigdor Gal and Oren Kurland of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at Technion, together with Noam Zeigerson, Director of Information and Analysis at Bank Hapoalim’s innovation division.

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Technion invites teams of secondary school students (years 9-12) from schools in the UK to create an Earth Day-inspired Rube Goldberg Machine

We invite you to visit the magnificent Technion campus in Haifa, located on the eastern slope of Mt. Carmel. The campus offers the opportunity to explore world-class science and technology and to meet the people of the Technion including world-renowned professors and brilliant students who are shaping the country’s future.

There are many opportunities to tour the campus as part of a group or on an individual trip. Please explore the options below and contact us if we can be of assistance.

If you will be in Israel for a family celebration or on business, you may organize a private tour of the campus. The Coler California Visitors Centre will welcome you and arrange your visit.

Interested in Art?

Should one think the Technion is only about science, take a walk on the Technion Sculpture Trail. Nearly two-dozen outdoor sculptures by major Israeli artists share the 327-acre campus, offering visitors art and the outdoors at the same time.