By Shira Rubin 6
T
el Aviv University Review presents some of the best and brightest of its alumni community who are pushing the envelope in neuroscience, social work, medicine, banking and entertainment – while looking to give a leg-up to the next generation along the way.
At the helm of “radical science” As an aspiring young painter, Oded Rechavi, who graduated with a PhD in biology from TAU, moved to Paris after his service in the IDF to discover, like many other would-be young painters, that he didn’t want to be an artist after all. The stint abroad brought Rechavi back home to Tel Aviv to claim his part in the family business: science (his parents are both medical doctors and scientists and his brothers are MD PhDs). In his “laboratory for radical science,” manned by a team of some twenty researchers, Prof. Rechavi is plumbing the depths of human heredity mechanisms and expanding on a once-revolutionary idea that DNA only tells part of the story. “I’m very interested to see how memories are encoded on a molecular level,” a topic that for years was seen as strictly non-scientific, said Prof. Rechavi, who is a graduate of TAU’s Adi Lautman Multidisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students. Today an associate professor at TAU’s George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, Rechavi is recipient of the 2018 Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists and the 2019 Kadar Family Award for Outstanding Research and is funded by the Adelis Foundation and Schmidt Futures. He remembers the days when his research raised eyebrows; it tapped into the same questions that, for centuries, had occupied the world’s greatest philosophers regarding the origins of the human condition. The questions included both the esoteric, like memories and character traits, and the physical, like diabetes or other medical ailments. Fundamentally, Prof. Rechavi
TAU Alumni Tel Aviv University graduates are applying their TAU acquired knowledge toward forging new frontiers in traditional and emerging professions – in Israel and abroad. But how, exactly, did they get to the top of their game? And what can their stories tell the students of tomorrow?
