Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

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The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Hebrew: הטכניון – מכון טכנולוגי לישראל‎; sometimes abbreviated as Technion IIT) is an institute (מכון) of higher education in Haifa, Israel. Founded in 1924, the Technion began with an emphasis on the natural sciences, engineering, and architecture, but has since also became one of the top medical schools in the world, with more current Nobel laureates on its faculty than any other medical school in Israel^[1].

The Faculty of Electrical Engineering, the largest Faculty at the Technion, has been ranked among the top fifteen electrical engineering departments in the world,^[2] while its engineering/technology and computer sciences faculties have been ranked among the top forty worldwide.^[3]

[edit] Programs of study

The Technion offers both undergraduate and graduate studies in a wide range of fields, including:

• Electrical engineering
• Civil and environmental engineering
• Mechanical engineering
• Biomedical engineering
• Chemical engineering
• Food engineering and biotechnology
• Agricultural engineering
• Aerospace engineering
• Industrial engineering and management
• Computer science
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Biology
• Architecture and urban planning
• Science education and technology education
• Medicine
• Materials science

Currently the Technion teaches around 13,000 students, about 10,000 of whom are undergraduates.

[edit] Early history

The Technion was conceived in the early 1900s by the German-Jewish fund Ezrah, as a school of engineering and sciences, and the only higher learning institution, in then Ottoman Palestine — other than the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (founded 1907). The cornerstone was laid in 1912, but studies began only 12 years later, following an intense debate over the language of instruction. Ezrah deemed the then-developing Modern Hebrew inappropriate for scientific instruction, and demanded that German be used instead. However, in the aftermath of World War I and the decline of Germany's influence as a European superpower, Hebrew was adopted.

The Technion was opened in 1924, although the official opening ceremony took place in 1925.

The first class amounted to 16 students, majoring in civil engineering and architecture.

During the 1930s, the Technion absorbed many Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany and its neighboring countries.

Until the opening of the school of engineering in the Ben Gurion University in the early 1970s, the Technion was the only institution in the country offering engineering degrees.

[edit] Academics

[edit] Faculty of Medicine

The Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Faculty of Medicine is one of three state sponsored medical schools in Israel. It was founded in 1969 and is active in basic science research and preclinical medical training in anatomy, biochemistry, biophysics, immunology, microbiology, physiology, pharmacology. Other facilities on the Faculty of Medicine campus include teaching laboratories, an exhaustive medical library, lecture halls and seminar rooms. Academic programs are offered at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine leading to the Master of Science (M.S.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), and Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degrees.

They have developed collaborative research and medical education programs with the world's leading institutions in medicine and bio-medical engineering including Johns Hopkins University and Mayo Medical School. Similarly, the Technion American Medical Students (TEAMS) program [4] at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine offers an American-styled, four-year, graduate medical training program geared towared American & Canadian students that wish to take advantage of the academic resources of the Technion, but plan to return to North America to practice medicine. The instruction and testing of TEAMS program is entirely in English.

[edit] Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management

Main article: The William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management at the Technion

The Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management at the Technion is the oldest such department in Israel. IE&M (Industrial Engineering & Management) was launched as a Technion academic Department in 1958. The Department grew under the visionary leadership of the late Professor Pinchas Naor, who served as its founding Dean. In a more traditional disciplinary model, which is still quite common today, Industrial Engineering (IE), which is typically associated with an engineering school, is separated from management programs that are taught in business schools. In contrast, Naor's vision was to combine IE with management by creating a large, inherently multi-disciplinary unit covering a wide spectrum of activities, from applied engineering to mathematical modeling; from economics and behavioral sciences to operations research and statistics. He saw all of these areas, and more, working in harmony to produce graduates who would form a highly skilled managerial elite for Israeli industry, as well as graduates who would pursue research careers to further enrich the academic community from which they graduated. Looking back from the perspective of nearly half a century, we have a lot to be proud of – the IE&M faculty at the Technion is the leading academic unit of its kind in Israel, and has achieved international recognition for its activities.

[edit] Distinguished faculty

• Computer Science Professor Emeritus Abraham Lempel and Electrical Engineering Professor Emeritus Yaacov Ziv, developers of the widely-used Lempel-Ziv (LZW) compression algorithm.
• Professor Avram Hershko and Professor Aaron Ciechanover, recipients of the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
• Dr. Marcelle Machluf is a senior lecturer at the Technion Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering
• Professor Nathan Rosen (d. December 18, 1995), co-author (with Albert Einstein and Boris Podolsky) of a famous 1935 physics paper about the EPR paradox in quantum mechanics.
• Professor Dan Shechtman, first observer of quasicrystals.
• Professor Asher Peres, co-discoverer of the phenomenon of quantum teleportation and distinguished researcher in quantum information theory. He was awarded the 2004 Rothschild Prize in Physics.
• Professor (emeritus) Jacob Bear, world-renown teacher, researcher, and author in the field of mathematical hydrogeology.
• Professor Eli Biham, prominent cryptanalyst and cryptographer.

[edit] Famous graduates

• Shai Agassi — IT entrepreneur, Former Executive Board member of SAP AG
• Saul Amarel (1928-2002), pioneer in Artificial intelligence.^[4]
• Itzhak Bentov — inventor and author
• Andrei Broder — captcha developer, prominent search engine Vice President at Yahoo, formerly vice president at AltaVista
• Yaron Brook — president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute
• Uzia Galil — founding father of the Israeli science-based industries
• Andi Gutmans — developer of PHP and co-founder of Zend Technologies
• Uzi Landau — Israeli politician
• Daniel M. Lewin — co-founder and CTO of Akamai, holder of two Technion degrees, speculated to have been killed while resisting AA Flight 11 hijackers according to the 9-11 Commission Report
• Udi Manber — BS 1975, MS 1978, prominent search engine developer and vice-president at Google, formerly vice-president at Amazon.com
• Dov Moran — BS, founder of M-Systems and InFone
• Yuval Neeman — Israeli physicist. One of his greatest achievements in physics was his discovery of the quark model
• Avraham Shochat — Israeli politician
• Zeev Suraski — developer of PHP and co-founder of Zend Technologies
• Yossi Vardi — civil servant, entrepreneur
• Avraham Yaski — winner of the 1982 Israel Prize for Architecture.
• Zohar Zisapel — BSEE 1970, founder of the RAD corporations

[edit] Academic achievements

A group of Technion graduates created PHP (versions 3 through 5,) a web programming language that is installed on more than 80% of the web servers worldwide.

A program devised by Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Shaul Markovitch of the Technion Faculty of Computer Science helps computers map single words and larger fragments of text to a database of concepts built from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia; this then helps in making broad-based connections between topics, to aid in filtering e-mail spam, performing searches and conducting electronic intelligence gathering at a more sophisticated level, according to the researchers.

[edit] Youth programs

The Technion offers many after-school and summer enrichment courses for young people on subjects ranging from introductory electronics and computer programming to aerospace, architecture, biology, chemistry and physics.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• List of universities in Israel

[edit] External links

• Official Technion website
• Technion Foreign Medical Students Program

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