The Technion Timeline
Scroll through to see Technion's 100 years of achievements
Prof. Josef Singer, from the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, had research contracts from the U.S. Air Force. His research was part of the experimental set-up that preceded the Apollo space program and the production of the Saturn V rocket. Later, Prof. Singer was the president of the Technion and won the Israel Prize for his research.
The Solid State Institute is an interdisciplinary research unit at the Technion; faculty members from the Faculties of Physics, Electrical Engineering, Chemistry and Materials Engineering work at the Institute. The Solid State Institute was established after the Technion decided to lead an initiative to establish a solid state institute in Israel, which researchers from the Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute also thought was necessary. Alexander Goldberg, the president of the Technion at the time, led the initiative, and a small but very functional building was built thanks to a donation from the Rosen family from Philadelphia. The first significant…Read More
A team of researchers led by Prof. Yitzhak Kidron develops detectors for night vision systems. The development was of crucial importance in the development of electro-optics in Israel.
Hollywood star Kirk Douglas visited the Technion to assist in filming a fundraising video for the Technion from the U.S. In a short clip we have, Douglas interviews a Technion student who planned to work as an engineer in the industry. Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch and who passed away in 2020, was not only a major star during Hollywood’s Golden Age but also a philanthropist, donor, and ardent supporter of the Technion. In 1983, he received the Albert Einstein Award from the American Technion Society. In 1989, Douglas returned to the Technion to film another promotional video.
The Samuel Neaman Institute was established at the Technion on the initiative of Mr. Samuel (Sam) Neaman, who was born in Rosh Pina in 1913 to a family that was one of the founders of Rosh Pina. The vision of the institute is to promote informed national decision-making in the State of Israel through research and analysis of established information. The institute conducts policy studies and reviews in a variety of fields, and their conclusions and recommendations are used by government and economic decision makers. The Samuel Neaman Institute’s research is widely cited in reports including those of government ministries,…Read More
The School of Medicine was founded in Haifa by a group of doctors who understood the importance of a school for medical education and research in the north of the country. The first cohort consisted of 43 students who completed their pre-clinical studies abroad and were then accepted to a four-year program in which two years of pre-clinical studies and two additional years of clinical training in hospitals in Israel were required for the degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD). In 1971, the Technion’s senate approved the merging the medical school into the Technion’s academic structure as a Faculty and…Read More
Shortly after the signing of the historic peace agreement with Egypt, a high level delegation visited the Technion. The minister of defense, Kamal Hassan Ali, visited the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering. Hosting someone who was a senior commander in the army and the head of the general intelligence service in Egypt in the security-sensitive Faculty of was a gesture of respect and trust towards the Egyptians.
The Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science was originally established as a department in 1969. In 1980 it became an independent Faculty headed by Abraham Lampel, one of the top Israeli computer scientists and inventor of the Lampel-Ziv algorithm. The Faculty of Computer Science is the second largest academic unit at the Technion (the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering is largest), with approximately 1,800 undergraduate students and approximately 300 graduate students.
For centuries, a crystal was considered a solid body with an external shape resembling a polyhedron. Classic examples included gemstones like diamonds and amethysts, as well as cooking salt and sugar crystals. Kepler and Aai hypothesized that the external shape was a result of the internal structure, which was an ordered arrangement of identical basic units. At the beginning of the 20th century, Friedrich, Knipping, and von Laue proved this hypothesis through the first X-ray crystallography experiments. Since then, it has been agreed that a crystal is a periodic arrangement of atoms. The formal definition of a periodic crystal structure…Read More
Nanosatellites, detecting signals on Earth, cloud mapping, innovative technologies for propulsion in space, an autonomous satellite fleet – all these and more occupy the people of the Asher Space Research Institute, the applied and research arm of the Technion. At the institute, researchers from different disciplines (physics, aeronautics and space engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science) work together on innovative tasks that contribute to Israel’s participation in space exploration. The institute’s building was officially inaugurated on February 12, 2009. It is near the Faculty of Aerospace Space Engineering at the Technion and is the home of the Satellite…Read More
In 1986, Professor Moussa Youdim and Professor John Feinberg, two researchers from the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion, approached Teva Pharmaceutical Industries. They conducted research on a specific molecule and proposed that Teva develop a drug for Parkinson’s disease based on their research. Teva’s chief scientist was enthusiastic and began promoting the development of the drug. Approximately 20 years later, the FDA approved Azilect, a drug that slows the progression of Parkinson’s disease, based on the research of Youdim and Feinberg. Until then, there was no treatment for Parkinson’s, despite efforts by eight pharmacological companies to find one. Azilect…Read More
Max Reis was a chemist. Born in Berlin in 1927, he earned a doctorate in chemical engineering from Imperial College London and graduated from Harvard University’s executive program. In 1956 he immigrated to Israel and started a family here. Reis was a member of the Atomic Energy Committee and served as vice president of Israel Chemicals Ltd. Dr. Reis served as chairman of the board of Model Systems for the development of computerized learning and training software, served as a director in various companies, including Yakhin Hakal, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, and the Union Bank of Israel, and as chairman of…Read More
On October 16, 1986, Ron Arad was captured by the Shia militia “Amal”, after he was forced to abandon his Phantom plane in the area of the city of Sidon in Lebanon. Very little is known about his fate since then and he is still classified as a prisoner. Arad was a navigator in the Israeli Air Force and a student at the Technion who had finished his first year of study in the Faculty of Chemical Engineering when he was called up for reserve service.
In the early 1980’s the Museum was just one small exhibition room. In 1985 the Technion vacated the building, and in 1987 MadaTech was officially recognized by the government. In a letter sent by Yitzhak Navon, Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education to the Government dated 1987, he declared MadaTech as Israel’s National Museum for science, design and technology. The official name was later changed to The Museum of Science, Technology and space. The Historical Building of the Technion On April 12, 1912 a big celebration took place in Hadar neighborhood in Haifa: On a land bought from…Read More
“Technology Entrepreneurship” is a weekly course in which entrepreneurs and startup veterans in Israel talk about their successes and failures. Some of the students who attended the course later returned to host it as entrepreneurs themselves. Prof. Dan Shechtman and Prof. Shlomo Maital initiated the course with the aim of giving students inspiration and encouragement to establish start-up companies, to give them practical knowledge about “how to do it” and to show them that it is possible! Since then, t:hub – the Technion’s entrepreneurship and innovation center – was established at the Technion, and various Faculties offer students relevant entrepreneurship…Read More
In 1989, Prof. Adam Mazor initiated the idea of preparing a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and long-term master plan for Israel in the 2000s. The result was “Israel 2020,” the program with the largest scope ever prepared in Israel. About 250 researchers from a wide variety of fields took part and worked for about seven years on writing it. For the first time, all the economic, social, infrastructure and environmental fields were included in one plan, with the aim of offering ways for the State of Israel to deal with the challenges of the 21st century. In particular, the program sought to…Read More
The mass immigration from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s increased the number of students at the Technion from 9,000 to 10,500 per year. To meet the growing demand for highly trained engineers and scientists, the Technion committed to increasing the student body to 15,000 by 2004. Interdisciplinary centers of excellence were established, ties with industry were strengthened, and new academic programs were developed. Additionally, a major expansion plan was initiated, including the construction of the Henry and Marilyn Taub Center for Science and Technology, which houses the Faculty of Computer Science—the largest of its kind in the…Read More
In 1987, research at the Technion accelerated in the field of optoelectronics, or studies and applications for light-emitting devices, leading to the inauguration of the Barbara and Norman Seiden Advanced Optoelectronics Center in 1989. The Center aimed to facilitate multidisciplinary research partnerships and attract Israeli researchers who had departed during the “brain drain” back to the country by establishing the Technion’s reputation for its world-class laboratories and computational research.
Zehev Tadmor (born February 6, 1937) is an Israeli scientist, a distinguished professor emeritus in the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Technion. He served as the president of the Technion for 8 years from 1990 to 1998. Tadmor was born in Romania and immigrated to Israel in 1950. Tadmor earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in chemical engineering from the Technion, and then a doctorate from the Stevens Institute of Technology Center in New Jersey, United States. He is a retired research professor at the Technion and served as dean of the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the…Read More
The Technion Incubator (TEIC), established in 1991, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Technion through its commercialization company, Dimotech Ltd. In recent years, the incubator has focused on the field of medical devices. To date, approximately 56 companies have emerged from the incubator, including Mazor Robotics, Labram, OptiGuide, NanoMotion, and OrganiTech.
Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the USSR, visited the Technion on the occasion of receiving the Harvey Prize. Born in 1931, Gorbachev was appointed leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 and resigned at the end of 1991. A year later, he received the Harvey Prize for his outstanding contribution to peace in the Middle East and as a token of appreciation for his bold initiatives that have unrecognizably improved the international relationships and the quality of life of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world and in our region in particular.
The Technion program for excellence was founded by Prof. Nimrod Moiseyev of the Faculty of Chemistry. It is a personalized academic program designed to foster curiosity and creativity and to strengthen students with leadership potential. Since the inception of the program, more than 300 graduates have completed it; many of them are currently serving as leaders in academia and industry. Twelve Technion faculty members are graduates of the program and other program graduates are researchers and faculty members at other universities in Israel and abroad. The program’s purpose is to raise and train the next scientists and researchers of the…Read More
Jacob Ziv, from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, won the Israel Prize in Exact Sciences. His research interests include data compression, information theory and statistical communication. Ziv, born in Israel, studied for a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the Technion in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and completed his doctorate at MIT in the United States. In 1970 he returned to the Technion, this time as a faculty member. Over the years, he also engaged in research at Bell Laboratories in the USA as a visiting scientist. Ziv served as the head of the Israel Academy of Sciences and won…Read More
The Mirabilis company is an icon of the Israeli high-tech dream. Its main investor was Yossi Vardi, the “guru” of Israeli high-tech, who graduated from the Technion in 1970. In 1996, Mirabilis was founded by Vardi’s son with three other partners, and its flagship product was ICQ instant messaging software. After two years, the company was sold to AOL for 400 million dollars! This sale defined the “exit” dream for Israeli entrepreneurs and brought about a wave of foreign investments in Israeli startups.
ZOLL® Itamar®, a division of ZOLL® Medical, is a leading company in sleep apnea diagnosis and pioneering innovative sleep apnea management programs for patients and healthcare professionals. Our mission is to improve access to the millions of undiagnosed sleep apnea patients with diagnostic testing and cardio sleep solutions through our breakthrough WatchPAT® products and services. Itamar® Medical was founded in 1995 and acquired by ZOLL® in 2021.
Prof. Josef Itskovitz-Eldor, in joint research with the University of Wisconsin, succeeded in isolating embryonic stem cells for the first time and discovered the enormous potential inherent in them for the production of various tissues. This breakthrough made the Technion a leader in embryonic stem cell research. Prof. Itskovitz-Eldor founded the Embryonic Stem Cell Lab at the Technion, was one of the few in the world who co-patented the creation of embryonic stem cells, and in his research continued to promote the potential inherent in them to cure various diseases. At the same time, he also served as the director…Read More