Lowy Distinguished Guest Past Professors

Prof. Alex Evilevitch, Lowy Distinguished Guest Professor for the academic year 2023/2024, is a professor in the Department of Experimental Medical Science, Faculty of Medicine, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. He holds an M.Sc. (1997) and a Ph.D. (1997) in Physical Chemistry from Lund University, Lund, Sweden. He pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, USA, in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department (2002-2004). Following his postdoctoral studies, he joined Lund University. Prof. Evilevitch has received several awards among them the Sven och Ebba-Christina Hagberg’s Prize in Biochemistry and Medicine (2008); the Akzo Nobel Nordic Science Prize for the research in Physical Chemistry of Viruses, Sweden (2005); the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research with Exceptional Accomplishments in research (2004); the Hebert Newby McCoy Award (2003); the Karin Kapucinet research scholarship for outstanding students from Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel (1996); and the Berzelius Award in Chemistry from Royal School of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden (1993). Prof. Evilevitch has attracted large research grants (over $7M) including from the Swedish Research Council (VR), the National Science Foundation (NSF, USA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH, USA). He has advised 7 doctoral students who received Ph.D. degrees and supervised 10 postdoctoral fellows and 38 undergraduate projects. He currently leads an international research team consisting of doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. He is the lead corresponding author of several highly ranked scientific publications in eLife, PNAS, Nature Chemical Biology, Nucleic Acids Research and JACS, to name a few of his 65 peer-reviewed publications. Prof. Evilevitch leads innovative and translational research in herpes- and corona virology, gene therapy as well as the development of antiviral therapeutics that do not lead to the development of resistance. He is the sole inventor of two approved US patents for a pioneering broad-spectrum method for the treatment of all nine human herpesviruses as well as animal herpes (veterinary use), resistant to viral mutations. He is an internationally renowned researcher who conducts research in the boundary area between cell biology, structural biology and biophysics with medical relevance. 

Prof. Joseph Y. Halpern, Lowy Distinguished Guest Professor for the academic year 2023/2024, is the Joseph C. Ford Chair of Engineering in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA. Prof. Halpern holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics (1975) from the University of Toronto, Canada, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics (1981) from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. In between, he spent two years as the head of the Mathematics Department at Bawku Secondary School, Ghana. Following graduation, he spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (joint appointment, 1981-1982). He then joined the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, USA, as a research staff member (1982-1996), and where he later served as the manager of the Mathematics and Related Computer Science Department (1988-1990). In parallel, he also held positions at Stanford University, California, USA, as visiting industrial professor (1984-1985), consulting assistant professor (1985-1987), consulting associate professor (1987-1991) and consulting full professor (1991-1996). In 1996, Prof. Halpern joined Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, as co-director of the Cognitive Studies Program and full professor in the Computer Science Department. At Cornell University, he was chair of the Computer Science Department (2010-2014), and has been the Joseph C. Ford Chair of Engineering since 2017. He also served as a visiting professor in Canada, the Netherlands and Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2009-2010, 2018). Prof. Halpern is a fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (2022), the National Academy of Engineering (2019), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2012), the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (2011), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005), the Association for Computing Machinery (2002) and the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (1993). Prof. Halpern received several awards for his research, among them the Kampé de Feriet Award (2016), the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award (2011), the Edsger Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing (2009), and the ACM/AAAI Newell Award (2008). Prof. Halpern has coauthored three books ("Reasoning About Knowledge", "Reasoning about Uncertainty", and "Actual Causality"), and over 160 journal publications and 200 conference publications. He was designated a Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information. He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM, and served on the editorial boards of Artificial Intelligence and Information and Computation. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Logic and Computation, Games and Economic Behavior and the Journal of Causal Inference. He started and continues to be the administrator of CoRR, the computer science section of arxiv.org. Prof. Halpern's major research interests are in reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, qualitative reasoning, causality, belief revision, (fault-tolerant) distributed computation, game theory, decision theory, security, and causality. Together with his former student, Yoram Moses, he pioneered the approach of applying reasoning about knowledge to analyzing distributed protocols and multi-agent systems. He has co-authored five patents. 
 

Prof. Sacha Stern, Lowy Distinguished Guest Professor for the academic year 2023/2024, is a Professor of Rabbinic Judaism in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London (UCL), UK. He holds a B.A. in Ancient and Modern History (1986) from the University of Oxford, UK, an M.A. in Ancient History and Social Anthropology from University College London (UCL), UK (1988), and a D.Phil. in Jewish Studies (1992) from Oxford. In 1991, he joined Jews’ College at the University of London, UK, where he served as a lecturer and senior lecturer in Jewish Studies (1991-2002). Then he served as a reader in Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK (2002-2005). Since 2005, he has held the position of Professor of Rabbinic Judaism in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL, UK, where he also served as head of the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department (2012 to 2022). Prof. Stern is a fellow of the British Academy. Since 2008, he has been the Principal Investigator of several major research projects funded by the AHRC, the ERC, and several other foundations (with grants of close to £4 million). Prof. Stern is the editor of the Journal of Jewish Studies and of two Brill series. An ancient historian by training, Prof. Stern specializes in late antique and early medieval Jewish history, rabbinic literature, and the history of calendars, time reckoning, and astronomy. He has made a world-leading contribution especially on the Jewish calendar, which he has developed as an entirely new area of research.