janeandbobandmore: TECHNION, Israel Institute of Technology

TECHNION: ISRAEL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

See Jane's grandparents, Mr. and Mr. Joseph Levine, New York City, on Technion Founders Wall

Israel is a high-tech leader in today’s world. Successes include WAZE that helps navigate via GPS; Mobile-Eye that alerts sleepy drivers to avoid a crash; drip irrigation that enables Israel’s desert to bloom. The spirit of invention and creativity underlies these great scientific successes – as described in Start-Up Nation by Saul Singer and Dan Senor.

Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, modeled after MIT, was founded in 1912 and is the nation’s oldest university. In 1961, Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, felt developing science and technology was essential to the growth of the nation. Therefore, he expanded Technion by giving it a 300 acre campus in Haifa where today 15,000 students study and do research in the fields of engineering, medicine, architecture, computer science, nanotechnology and more. Currently Technion is building satellite campuses in NYC and in China.

You’ll find Israeli-Arab physicians on staff at every Israeli hospital. But only Carmel Medical Center in Haifa can boast that its newest Israeli-Arab obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Mais Ali Saleh, recently graduated No. 1 in her class at the Technion Medical School.

When Albert Einstein was pursuing groundbreaking research at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies, he also helped found the American Technion Society. He would come into NYC to and meet with potential donors. Perhaps my grandfather attended such a meeting and became a Technion Founder. We have followed my grandfather’s lead as American supporters of Technion. Now in Haifa, we had the opportunity to visit the campus and to see the educational and research opportunities Technion offers to all Israelis.