A Letter to the Technion Family From President Uri Sivan

Dear Technion Family,

The academic year 5784 will commence soon and it will be a different and sorrowful year. The three months that have passed since October 7 have been painful and challenging for the State of Israel and the Technion family. Dozens of our friends’ family members were murdered, and others were abducted. Many have been injured or killed in the war, and our hearts are filled with pain and worry.

Approximately 2,500 students, faculty members, and administrative staff were called up for reserve duty, and many of them are still serving. In the spirit of Technion tradition, we postponed the opening of the academic year to await their return. As the expected release is delayed, we responded to the IDF’s request and delayed the opening of the year to January 14, 2024.

The upcoming academic year marks a historic milestone for us. Exactly one hundred years have passed since the Technion opened its doors in the historical building in Hadar HaCarmel with 16 male students and one female student. Who could have then foreseen that from that humble beginning would grow a top-tier research university, graduating one hundred thousand alumni, who have shouldered the security and prosperity of the State of Israel? Who could have imagined that our researchers would be awarded Nobel Prizes, and our influence on humanity would be so significant?

We did it all in our humble and persistent way, year after year. This has been our response to all the events, wars, and acts of terror that have afflicted us before the founding of the State and afterwards. This will also be our response to the appalling terrorist acts of Hamas, intended to undermine our determination, sow fear, create conflict within Israeli society, and drag us into the moral abyss in which they operate.

Nobody can divert us from our path. We will conquer the anger and the pain and immerse ourselves in achieving our goals with the spirit of our constitution: ‘To disseminate knowledge through education and promote knowledge through pure and applied research.’ We will continue to educate for the values that have guided us through the past tumultuous one hundred years: tolerance, inclusivity, the pursuit of truth and justice, and deep social responsibility towards all people. We will continue to support the security and economy of the State of Israel, and just as importantly, we will continue to embrace the entire Israeli society.

If we needed proof of our solidarity as a committed community, we received it in the last few months in the inspiring voluntary efforts of the Technion community. Alongside the enlistment of thousands in the reserves, the student union, academic and administrative staff rallied for a vast array of activities to support those whose lives were put on hold. We hosted hundreds of families who were evacuated from the south and north on campus, supported thousands of our own recruits, and addressed the diverse needs of the security forces.

This is the finest hour of the Technion family, and now we must channel these tremendous forces also to confront the additional challenges ahead of us. We must return to the routine of studies and research as in every year, and at the same time continue to support those among us whose lives have changed forever. We all must strive to heal the rifts in Israeli society, and we must continue to assist the thousands of women and men among us who left everything behind and enlisted to defend the country. We face enormous challenges, but from my acquaintance with this remarkable institution, its resilience, and the solidarity of the Technion family, I have no doubt that we will succeed.

Finally, I would like to remind you all, that my door and the doors of the entire administration are always open, especially during these challenging times. Please, do not hesitate to reach out with any problem or suggestion.

Wishing you all success and a fruitful academic year!

Technion President Uri Sivan

Several Israeli companies have joined the government-led initiative to ease traffic congestion.

Over the next two years, Israeli drone operating companies will conduct test flights throughout the country for one week each month. (B.Y. Creative & Productions)

A network of large drones – many of which are operated by Technion alums – have taken to the skies as the country prepares its national airspace for air taxi transportation and deliveries.

The Israel National Drone Initiative (INDI) – a two-year, NIS 60 million government-led pilot project – was established in 2019 to fly passengers and heavy cargo to reduce congestion on Israel’s busy roads.

Eleven drone companies were involved in the experimental flights this week, including:

  • Cando Drones. Its fully autonomous two-seater air taxi has been developed to carry passengers up to 220kg for up to 30km. CTO Moshe Kipnis and CFO Alon Zabuski are both alumni of the Technion.
  • Airways Drones. A provider of AI-based systems for the smart management of drone fleets. Investor, Oded Agam and Advisory Board Member, Yosef Fryszer, are alumni of the Technion.
  • Robotican. A developer of ground and air-based mobile autonomous robotic systems. Chief Scientist Amir Shapiro and Business Development Director, Eli Ben-Aharon, are both alumni of the Technion.

The INDI initiative is developing a “system of aerial routes in the sky” to allow different types of drones to fly simultaneously for various purposes, such as healthcare, commerce, security and passenger transportation.

Transportation Minister, Miri Regev, said: “This is the first initiative of its kind in the world for an extensive and multidisciplinary examination of new technologies, including the transportation of cargo and, later, people. The collaborative project examines all the aspects – including regulation and legislative changes – involved in the commercial operation of drones as an additional tool to deal with congestion.”

Over the next two years, the participating companies in the INDI initiative will continue to conduct flights throughout the country in controlled airspace.

Aleph Farms, which a Technion professor co-founded, continues to break more records in this latest development

The first company to grow steaks directly from the cells of cows has now received the first halachic ruling regarding the kosher status of cultivated meat.

Chief Rabbi of Israel, David Lau, made the announcement yesterday (Wednesday, January 18th), following an examination of the production methods in the company’s laboratory and speaking with experts in the field.

Rabbi Lau noted, however, that if it is marketed as meat or is “similar to meat in taste and smell”, it should not be mixed or consumed with dairy products.

Co-founded by Technion Professor, Shulamit Levenberg, from the Biomedical Engineering Faculty at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, Aleph Farms has – to date – raised $120 million in funding. It is awaiting marketing approval for its first product – Minute Steak – before it enters the market for the first time.

Other notable animal-free produce startups linked to the Technion include SavorEat, a company that produces 3D-printed burger patties via a robot chef using ingredient cartridges, SuperMeat, which takes cell cultures from chickens and Imagindairy, which develops real milk in the lab without harming animals.

Aleph Farms hopes to launch its Minute Steak in Israel this year, followed by other countries around the world next year.

Meanwhile, Professor Levenberg is working on a host of other exciting innovations, including genetically engineering muscle tissue to cure type-2 diabetes and treating spinal cord injury patients with exosome therapy, which contains three times the amount of growth factors of stem cells, is less invasive and doesn’t rely on human donors.

Lord Tariq Ahmad of Wimbledon spent time at the Israel Institute of Technology on an official visit to Israel

Minister of State for the Middle East is impressed by Technion visit
PHOTO: Professor Hossam Hayek showing Lord Ahmed his invention


The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology was delighted to welcome the Minister of State for the Middle East to its campus this week.

Lord Tariq Ahmad – a British Muslim politician – was impressed with the proportion of Arab students on campus. 30% of this years new students are from the Arab Community and benefit from the Technion Empowerment Programme which gives them individual attention, supervision and monitoring, particularly in their learning of Hebrew which is one of the biggest challenges for Arab students. 

This educational model has since been copied by other institutions throughout Israel, enabling a growth in Arab university students in Israel of 78% over seven years, according to research by Israel’s Council for Higher Education. 

Lord Ahmad – along with representatives from the British Embassy and the British Council – were welcomed to the campus by the President of the Technion, Uri Sivan, along with several members of the senior team. They learned that 5,000 out of 20,000 students live on campus – the highest number in Israel.

He asked about all the impressive high-tech companies he had driven past on his way to the campus, such as Google and Intel, and learned that they have all come to Haifa because of the Technion and to recruit graduates from the University.

He was also interested to learn that nearly 70% of the founders and CEOs of Israeli start-up companies are Technion graduates and that there are two campuses abroad – one in China and one in New York.

Taking to Twitter following his visit, he wrote: “Fantastic to visit Technion – Israel Institute of Technology University and learn more about the vibrant Israeli innovation scene. I met Professor Uri Sivan and with Professor Hossam Hayek, a BIRAX recipient who created the groundbreaking ‘Alzheimer’s breath test’.”

This invention. which is also used to detect cancer in a matter of seconds was shown to King Charles when he last visited Israel a few years ago. He said that this is a remarkable technological development and an ingenious invention.

The Churchill Awards Gala Dinner was back with a bang after a long hiatus

An incredible quarter of a million pounds was raised for Technion UK during its first gala dinner in three years.

Over 300 people enjoyed a Tony Page catered event at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London on Sunday night. 

Nobel laureate, Professor Dan Schechtman, who defied critics for his “off-the-wall theory” and the went on to claim the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, delivered the illuminating keynote speech. He spoke about the importance of education and gave examples of his contribution to help the Technion become the powerhouse of Israel’s high-tech society having trained most of Israel’s engineers who helped build the country.

Baroness Ruth Deech DBE, a British academic, lawyer, ethicist and politician received the prestigious Churchill Award and members of the Technion Chamber Orchestra provided entertainment, wowing the room with a violin medley of classical pieces.

For the first time,guests were invited to choose exactly where their donation went: The Program of Excellence for fast-tracked students, the Defence and Aerospace department, the Sustainability and Grand Technion Energy Program and research into Parkinson’s and other neo-generative diseases. 

Baroness Ruth Deech DBE said: “I cannot tell you how delighted I was with the dinner and the award – more than I deserve! It is a great piece of art, and I shall treasure it. The dinner was beautifully organised and conducted and it was a privilege to hear Dan Shechtman.”

CEO of Technion UK, Alan Aziz, said: “I’m delighted that after three long years we have been able to host another big gala dinner with amazing speakers and guests!”

Last month the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology synthetic biology team took off for theInternational Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, held in Paris. The students in the group were engineering special bacteria that will produce an industrial substance that deters hair loss, and which can be added to regular shampoos and other haircare products.

Illustrative: A chemotherapy patient lying in a hospital bed. (iStock via Getty Images) 

This year, the iGEM team from the Technion included 12 students from across the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering, the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, and the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. The team recently received a special Impact grant given to only a small number of the teams participating in the global competition based on their projected benefits to humanity.

Every year, the team chooses an innovative project in the field of synthetic biology, and this year, it involves substances that inhibit hair loss caused by chemotherapy. One of the most common cancer treatments, chemotherapy causes damage to healthy, living tissues and oftentimes hair loss, among other severe side effects.

The Technion team set to compete in iGEM worked on proving the feasibility of lab production of Decursin, a hair loss deterrent, and its possible incorporation into preparations including shampoo, cream, and more. Decursin is a major component of Angelica gigas Nakai (AGN) root extract. It has many beneficial properties including the abilities to suppress inflammation, repress cancer, and prevent apoptosis – or programmed cell death, which includes hair cells.

Today, the molecule is produced from a rare seasonal flower grown in Korea in an expensive and inefficient process. The student team is engineering bacteria that will produce Decursin industrially.

The prestigious iGEM competition was founded in 2004 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to give students, mainly undergraduates, a chance to experience scientific and applied research in the world of synthetic biology. Since its inception, the competition has been held in Boston. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was held online for the past two years.

This year, more than 300 teams from around the world will participate in the competition, including three Israeli teams – one from the Technion, one from Tel Aviv University, and one from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The first Israeli iGEM team was established at the Technion in 2012 under the guidance of Professor Roee Amit, a faculty member in the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering. He guides the Technion team to this day.

Over the years, teams from the Technion have won multiple gold medals in the competition. But according to Prof. Amit, “Beyond participation and winning, it is important to understand that some of the developments by the Technion teams have already been turned into applied and commercial tracks and have a real impact in the world. One of the most prominent examples is Koracell, which was founded on the basis of the technology developed by our students in preparation for a competition iGEM ​​in 2019. The group developed an innovative technology for the production of honey without bees using a genetically engineered bacterium. This technology allows the honey’s texture and taste to be precisely designed, and it is also a platform for simulating other natural metabolic processes.”

World Sight Day is October 13th.

OrCam Technologies, which has been around since 2010, is continually coming up with new innovations 

As we approach World Sight Day, one Israeli company is ensuring it continues to deliver groundbreaking solutions for the visually impaired.

OrCam Technologies, whose Vice President of Research & Development, Nir Sancho, is a Technion alum, has recently launched OrCam Learn – an interactive assistive solution that empowers students with learning challenges, such as dyslexia. 

The handheld assistive device is compact and wireless with an intuitive point-and-click operation that reads out loud any text that has been captured by a student. It will then listen to and provide feedback on the student’s reading comprehension, using a variety of metrics such as text difficulty level, fluency, accuracy, reading rate and total reading time.  

It works across a range of formats, including books, screens or paper handouts. 

Its technology supports both teachers and schools and results in enhanced comprehension, reading fluency and improvement of overall confidence in an education setting. 

There are currently over 50 schools in the UK currently using OrCam Learn.

The innovation is just the latest in a long line for the award-winning company. At the beginning of the year, it won a CES innovation award for its MyEye Pro device, which aids the blind and visually impaired by reading out printed and digital text, as well as recognising people and helping to identify products.

The MyEye Pro is mounted onto a pair of glasses to communicate visual information. Its new ‘Smart Reading’ feature, which helps users find specific information – much like the Ctrl-F (Find) functions on a computer – helped sway the judges, along with its voice assistant, which “enables control of all device features and settings hands-free, using voice commands.”    

Meanwhile, OrCam Read – the handheld digital reader – won Best Consumer Edge AI End Product at the 2022 Edge AI and Vision Product of the Year Awards.

Launched in 2020, it supports people with mild to moderate vision loss, as well as those with difficulty reading, using a ‘point and click’ function that allows the device to read text from print or screens. 

It was featured in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2021

Technion Is Europe’s top university in the field of artificial at intelligence for the second year in a row calling to an international ranking of computer science institutions globally

The university also placed 16th in the world in the field of AI and 10th in the world in the subfield of learning systems.

The Technion continues to establish its position as the leading research institution in Israel and Europe in the core areas of artificial intelligence, thanks to the unique work environment that exists in this field at the Technion,” said Shie Mannor, a co-director of Tech.AI − Technion Artificial Intelligence Hub.

Around 150 Technion researchers are involved in Tech.AI, applying advanced AI practices to a variety of fields including data science, medical research, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, architecture and biology  

Solidifying the Technion‘s position as a pioneer and world leader in the field of AI and spreading the knowledge acquired in this process to the commercial world in all its aspects are very important national tasks,” said fellow Tech.Al Co-Director Assaf Schuster.

According to Shai Shen-Orr, who leads the biomed activity and AI solutions for the health sector within Tech.AI, the centre has used its advancements in the field of AI to create partnerships with companies such as Pfizer and IBM and leading medical institutions including the Rambam Health Care Campus in Israel and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre.

The Technion recently announced that it has established a new institute that will focus on applying AI research to create solutions in the field of human health and medicine.

And why H2Pro, set up by Technion Professors is the Israeli startup we all need to know about!

We are living through an exciting part of the global journey to reducing carbon emissions, thanks to a transition to clean energy that’s gaining serious momentum.

Between the ongoing economic recovery from Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine – highlighting the need for the Western world to become energy independent – investments in the global renewable energy market are expected to increase significantly. 

By 2040, around 10% of the world’s primary energy demand could be replaced by hydrogen, while the global hydrogen market is expected to more than double by 2050.

Israel, as one example, is currently aiming for 30% of its energy to be renewable by 2030 – a considerable increase on the 2020 total of 7%.

But its success relies on many factors, such as creating more storage, reducing the reliance on fossil fuels and making energy systems more flexible and resilient.

As the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen is a portable, scalable fuel that can serve as a lifeline to sectors that are difficult and costly to electrify, such as long-haul trucking, maritime shipping and air travel.

As a zero-carbon duel, it is also an environmentally-friendly option for high-heat industrial processes, such as steel and cement.

The one to watch out for

While others are developing in the market, H2Pro is at the forefront of making these targets a reality, thanks to its revolutionary method for efficiently splitting water into its two components of hydrogen and oxygen.

Using electricity, the elements are generated separately, unlike conventional electrolysis, enabling a 95% system efficiency.

Founded by Professors Gideon Grader and Avner Rothschild and Drs. Hen Dotan and Avigail Landman of the Grand Technion Energy Programme in 2019, the company, which counts Bill Gates as an investor, has laid the cornerstone of its first production facility, which, when completed, will produce affordable green renewable energy at scale.

Kidney failure, Multiple Sclerosis and stroke are all being targeted

Two Technion master’s degree students have created a way to accurately predict whether a person is likely to have a stroke.

Working under the supervision of the head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Medicine, Shany Biton and Sheina Gendelman worked with more than one million ECG recordings from more than 400,000 patients to create a machine-learning algorithm to assess the likelihood of developing an irregular heart rhythm atrial fibrillation (AFib), which causes one in seven strokes.

Only 5% of the 60% predicted to develop AFib did not go on to develop the condition.

It means countless lives could be saved as those at risk are notified in advance, enabling them to make necessary lifestyle changes to either prevent or delay the condition. 

Professor Behar, who led the study, said: “We do not seek to replace the human doctor. We don’t think that would be desirable. But we wish to put better decision support tools into the doctors’ hands.”

Meanwhile, two Technion-led startups are changing the way we treat some of the most common health conditions.

CollPlant Biotechnologies – led by alum Yechiel Tal – is working with United Therapeutics Corporation to manufacture artificial kidneys using a former tobacco plant. The process includes growing small plantlets from the seeds of engineered tobacco plants to create the collagen required for the 3D printing of human organs.

“Organ shortages are an unmet global health need, [and] by partnering with United Therapeutics, we have made significant progress with this pivotal organ manufacturing initiative,” Tal said. “We remain committed to exploring new innovative applications in the fields of medical aesthetics and 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs.”

NeuroGenesis – whose COO is a Technion alum – is another Israeli company making giant strides in healthcare thanks to its stem cell therapy which hopes to regenerate the brain of MS sufferers. 

Of 15 patients who received spinal injections from their own bone marrow, nine experienced a drop in levels of neurofilament light chain – a protein heightened as the disability progresses – and eight went on to have improved disability scores, even after a year.

The peer-reviewed study has been published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine.