2021 HONORARY PRESIDENT
H.E. Gianluigi Benedetti
Italian Ambassador in Japan, Former Italian Ambassador in Israel
Committee Members
BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV
Cristina Bettin
President and co-founder
Cristina Bettin Ph.D. is a Social Historian. She is the Organizer and Coordinator of the track’s studies of Civilization Language and Society, Ethics and Moral, Multiculturalism, and Intellectual Creativeness at the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ben Gurion University. Her research interest and publication are divided between Jewish Studies, (in particular Italian Jewish identity and Italian culture and society. The Jewish Palestinian Soldiers and the Jewish Brigade in Italy, where she co-founded in 2018 in Milan, the Museum of the Jewish Brigade. Italy- British Palestine and Israel relations, before, during, and after WWII. Aliya Beth and the Role of Italy in the establishment of the State of Israel)European Studies and, the Role of Humanities for a Sustainable society.
Email: bettin@bgu.ac.il
WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE
Elisabetta Boaretto
Vice-President
Elisabetta Boaretto, Ph.D., is the Director of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science and the Head of the Dangoor Research Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Laboratory for Radiocarbon Dating at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research is focused on solving questions in archaeology using scientific methods. She has co-direct the excavation at Boker Tachtit studying the chronology related to the arrival of modern humans in the Levant. She has developed new methods to study the archaeological record and characterize the materials in relation to past activities. She is particularly interested in understanding the effect of past climate changes on past cultures.
Email: Elisabetta.boaretto@weizmann.ac.il
TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY
Chiaretta Giordano
Representative Ph.D. and Post Doc Students, Media and Communication
Chiaretta Giordano, Ph.D. student at the law department of Tel Aviv University. Her Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary project that spaces from the nutritional anthropological investigation of the role of traditional foods in healthy diets and the legal and political analysis of the impact of modern food policies on traditional foods and the increase in food insecurity. Chiaretta was a fellow at the Manna Center Program for Food Safety and Security. In 2021 Chiaretta was awarded by the Center for the Study of the United States in partnership with the Fulbright Program for the analysis of the food security of Native Americans during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Her current fields of interest are minority groups’ rights, public health, food policy, gender equality, and racial and ethnic equality.
Email: chiarettag@mail.tau.ac.il
BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV
Aaron Fait
Treasurer and co-founder
Aaron Fait, PhD., Max and Rochelle Etingin Chair in Desert Research French Associates Institute for Agriculture and Biotechnology of Drylands.
The Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is specialized in the field of metabolomics and metabolic natural variance. In the past 13 years at Ben Gurion University, at the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, he set up the laboratory for metabolomics to investigate seed and fruit metabolism and metabolic stress response in crops. Since 2009 his lab has been heavily involved in several projects on desert viticulture and grape quality in a changing climate.
Email: fait@bgu.ac.il
BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV
Nadav Davidovich
Board Member
Nadav Davidovich, MD, MPH, Ph.D. is an epidemiologist and public health physician in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Guilford-Glaser Faculty of Business and Management at Ben-Gurion University and currently serves as Director of the university’s School of Public Health. His current research deals with health policy; health inequities; health and immigration; vaccination policy; environmental health, global health, and public health history and ethics. Prof. Davidovitch serves on several international and national committees, among them: Governing Board, European Public Health Association; Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER) COVID-19 Task Force; Israel advisory committee for COVID-19.
Email: nadavd@bgu.ac.il
UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA
Andrea Ghermandi
Board Member
Ph.D., Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Haifa. He is an editor for the journals Ecosystem Services and PeerJ – The Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences and an alumnus of the Global Young Academy. An environmental engineer by training, his research spans a range of fields including the valuation and mapping of ecosystem services, the use of research synthesis techniques and crowdsourced digital data in environmental studies, and the technical and economic analysis of ecological engineering and nature-based solutions. His research on the use of social media in environmental research was awarded the 2021 Stage-BGU Award for Excellence in Environmental Sciences.
Email: aghermand@univ.haifa.ac.il
TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY
Marcelo Sternberg
Board Member
Marcelo Sternberg, Ph.D., School of Plant Sciences & Food Security, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University. He is an experimental ecologist interested in the effects of human activities on natural and agricultural ecosystems. Within this topic, he addresses questions covering global climate change, plant ecology, ecosystem functioning, and agroecology. In particular, he is interested in the development of ecological research using experimental approaches to tackle the challenges of global climate change. Prof. Sternberg was recently nominated as Chang Jiang Chair Professor at Ningxia University in China. This is the highest academic award given by the Chinese government to scientists.
Email: marcelos@tauex.tau.ac.il
HONORARY MEMBER
Roni Benatoff
President of the Israel - Italy Chamber of Commerce and Industry
HONORARY MEMBER
Nora Alkabes
Director of the Italian Technion Society
