2013 Honorary Doctorate Recipients
Leonard Blavatnik
Founder and Chairman of Access Industries, Len Blavatnik was born in Odessa and raised in Russia. He emigrated to the US with his family in 1978, became a US citizen in 1984, and completed a master’s degree in Computer Science at Columbia University and an MBA at Harvard Business School. An active philanthropist, he and the Blavatnik Family Foundation have provided significant support to a wide range of educational, scientific, cultural and Jewish institutions around the world, including the endowment of the Blavatnik School of Computer Science at TAU in 2008 and the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University in 2010. Blavatnik is a Governor of Tel Aviv University and the New York Academy of Sciences, and is a member of Harvard University's Committee on University Resources.
Jeremy Coller
British entrepreneur Jeremy Coller founded his business in 1990. Coller Capital is today a global firm with some $10 billion under management and interests in over 2,500 companies. Coller is recognized for his pioneering of new asset classes, in particular the facilitation and promotion of liquidity through secondary trading in private equity interests. He holds a BSc in Management Sciences from Manchester University, an MA in philosophy from Sussex University and a Diplôme Cours de Civilisation from the Sorbonne. In 2011, he received an Honorary Fellowship from the London Business School and, in 2008, was named Manchester University’s Alumnus of the Year. He is the author of The Lives, Loves and Deaths of Splendidly Unreasonable Inventors, an analysis of 30 inventors who changed the world.
Ray Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff is a professor at Tufts University and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. He specializes in the study of meaning in natural language, its connection to the human conceptual system and its linguistic expression. He is also a classical clarinetist, and often performs recital and chamber music in the Boston area. Together with composer Prof. Fred Lerdahl, he wrote a book on musical cognition, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, in 1983. He is former President of the Linguistic Society of America and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and a member of several other academic associations. He received the 2003 Jean Nicod Prize in Cognitive Philosophy, and holds honorary degrees from the Université du Québec à Montréal and the National University of Music in Bucharest.
Harvey M. Krueger
Harvey Krueger is Vice Chairman of Barclays Capital, the successor to Lehman Brothers, Inc. of which he was also Vice Chairman. In 1977, Harvey merged Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., the investment banking firm of which he was President and CEO, with Lehman Brothers. Prior to joining Kuhn, Loeb in 1959, he worked for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore after graduating from Columbia Law School in 1953. Harvey, who has been deeply involved with Israel since 1961, is credited with, essentially single-handedly, opening the international capital markets to the Israel government and Israel’s corporations. He has served on the Boards of Directors of many American, Israeli and European companies, including Delta Galil Industries, Ltd., RG Barry Corp., Duff & Phelps, and Automatic Data Processing, Inc. He presently is a Director of Hansard Global plc. Harvey is former Chairman and current Trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institute. He is a member of the Boards of Directors of Beth Hatefutsoth, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, and its parent Continuum Health Partners. Harvey was Chairman of the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was President and Chairman of the American Friends of the Hebrew University, and is past Chairman of the Peres Center for Peace. Harvey served on the Advisory Board of Carnegie Mellon University Department of History and was a Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.
Robert S. Langer
The David H. Koch Professor at MIT, Robert Langer received his BSc from Cornell University in 1970 and his ScD from MIT in 1974, both in chemical engineering. He has published some 1,200 scientific articles and holds approximately 800 issued and pending patents that have been licensed or sublicensed to over 200 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotech and medical device companies. A former member and chairman of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Science Board, he was selected by Forbes Magazine in 2002 as one of the world’s 15 innovators who will reinvent our future. Langer is among only a handful of people ever to be elected to all three United States National Academies and – at age 43 – the youngest ever to hold this distinction. He holds honorary degrees from institutions around the world.
Maurice Lévy
Maurice Lévy joined the Publicis Groupe in 1971 and was named Chairman and CEO in 1987. Under his stewardship, the multinational company has grown into a global powerhouse of integrated and digital communications. Lévy is a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum in Geneva and the Supervisory Boards of La Compagnie Financière Edmond de Rothschild. He is former President of the EEC’s “Comité de Sages” (Committee of Wise Men) for the digitization of European cultural heritage and of the French Association of Private Sector Companies. He co-founded the French Institute for Brain and Spinal Cord disorders (ICM) and co-authored The Intangible Economy Report. He holds the distinctions of Grand Officier d'Ordre National du Mérite, and Commandeur du Légion d’Honneur, among others.
Judith Yovel Recanati
Judith Yovel Recanati is a leading social activist who is committed to, and strives for, a stronger, healthier Israeli society. She is the founder and chairperson of NATAL: Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War (1998), an organization that assists victims on their path to healing. She is the recipient of the President's Award for Volunteerism (2008). Together with her late husband, Dr. Israel Yovel, and her children, she founded the Gandyr Family Foundation in 2004. Yovel Recanati is an active member of the ”Committed to Give” (CTG) group, a social entrepreneurship initiative for promoting Israeli philanthropy, and she serves on the boards of several civil society organizations. She is the mother of three daughters and grandmother of seven.
Carla J. Shatz
Carla Shatz is a professor of biology and neurobiology and the Sapp Family Provostial Professor at Stanford University. She received her BSc in chemistry from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, before studying biology at University College London. She later completed a PhD in neurobiology at Harvard in 1976 under the supervision of Nobel laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiese. Shatz’s ongoing research on brain connectivity during development has garnered her numerous scientific and popular accolades, and she was invited to speak on the subject at the White House in 1997. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society and the Institute of Medicine, and serves on several medical advisory boards.
Miriam Zohar-Galblum
Born in Czernowitz, Romania, Miriam Zohar-Galblum survived the Holocaust as a child, together with her mother and brother; her father perished in the death camps. At the end of the war, she boarded the Pan York ma’apilim ship to Palestine, only to be stopped en route by the British and sent to a detention camp in Cyprus. It was during this time that her first sparks of interest in acting surfaced and, upon reaching Israel, she helped found an immigrant Yiddish theater group. In 1951, she auditioned for Habima and, since then, has performed in dozens of classical and modern dramati works at the country’s top theaters, among them: Shaw’s Cleopatra, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Miller’s Crucible and Death of a Salesman. She has won the Israel Prize, Klausner Prize, Gnessin Prize, Silver Rose Award and many others.
