Hebrew University scientists named fellows of American Academy

Jerusalem, May 6, 2008 – Two Hebrew University of Jerusalem professors have been elected as new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They are Prof. Haim Sompolinsky, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, and Prof. David Kazhdan of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics.

They will be inducted into the Academy along with other distinguished scientists, scholars and public figures at a ceremony to be held on Oct. 11 in Cambridge, Mass. Among the honorees: Michael Dell, founder of the Dell computer company, and Oscar-winning Spanish film director, producer and screenwriter Pedro Almodovar.

Copenhagen-born Prof. Sompolinsky, who is at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Science, is involved in investigating cooperative aspects of information processing in the brain, focusing on the interplay between network architecture, neural dynamics and computation. He is developing a statistical physics theory of learning, memory and rule discovery in neural networks.

Prof. Kazhdan, who is also a professor emeritus at Harvard University, was born in Moscow and earned his doctorate in the former USSR. He emigrated from the Soviet Union to take a position at Harvard University in 1975. In 2005 he immigrated to Israel and is now a researcher in the Hebrew University’s Einstein Institute of Mathematics.

Now in its 228th year, the American Academy of Art and Sciences has included in its membership the most famous scientific and intellectual world figures throughout the generations.