Prof. Joseph Klafter – Israel Prize laureate in the field of chemistry and physics

Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz on Tuesday announced the award of the Israel Prize laureate in the field of chemistry and physics research, Prof. Joseph Clafter, and congratulated him on winning the award. The award committee was chaired by Prof. Shlomo Havlin, chaired by the committee, along with the members – Prof. Lucian Ben Gigi, Prof. Rachel Yerushalmi Rosin and Prof. Uri Chshanovsky.
In its reasoning, the committee noted that: “The Israel Prize in Physics and Chemistry Research was awarded to Professor Joseph Clafter for his groundbreaking contributions to the dynamics of anomalous motion in various and varied systems in the fields of chemistry, physics and biology. Over the years, the immense and universal importance of his work has become evident as more and more systems are exhaustively described by the methods he has developed.

Prof. Clapter’s resume as provided by the award committee

Professor Joseph (Yossi) Klafter was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 to Slovak immigrant parents who immigrated to Israel in the illegal immigration in 1939. He completed his studies at the elementary and high school in Rishon Lezion.

After graduating from high school, he began his studies, as part of the academic reserve, at Bar Ilan University. Towards the end of school, the Six-Day War broke out, in which Clapter took part nowadays, during which he was wounded in a battle at the Commissioner’s Palace. Prior to his enlistment into the IDF, he completed his master’s degree under the guidance of Professor Haim Halpern on “The Theory of the Situation of Crystals”,

Upon his release from the IDF, he was accepted for doctoral studies at the Tel Aviv University School of Chemistry. He did his dissertation under the guidance of Professor Joshua Yortner on the topic: “Electronic states and energy transfer in ordered and unordered molecular crystals.” During the studies, Klafter married Floria and their children.

After receiving the Ph.D., the Clafter family moved to Boston as part of a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry at MIT (1978). In the postdoctoral period, Klafter turned to a new field of research around movement in complex systems. These were his first steps on questions related to random moves in amorphous intermediaries. In this context, Klapter published a controversial issue, an end to that controversy, which was the basis and justification for the use of random, time-dependent measures that underpinned the use of these moves in chemical and physical systems. As a result of this research, she was invited to join the Exxon Research Center (which turned to solar cells and cargo carrier traffic) and the family moved to New Jersey in 1980. Exxon’s years of research were fertile, revealed new questions and problems that originated in applied and during which Clapter’s work contributed significantly to understanding fractal structure reactions as composite systems models and obtained first significant results in diffusion anomaly research. In 1987, the family returned to Israel and Clafter joined, as part of the Oak scholarship, at Tel Aviv University’s School of Chemistry.

At Tel Aviv University, Clafter set up an active research group that became a source of interest to many visitors and extensive collaborations. In fact, the group was a core building community that has been branching out and today it is an active and vibrant international network based on its peers, students and students.

Over the years, since the return, relations with Exxon have continued and close ties with universities such as: Bayreuth, Berlin, and Freiburg in Germany, ETH in Switzerland, Charles University of Prague, University of Paris VI, MIT, Ecole Polytechnique Columbia and more. Klafter has been invited to teach graduate courses at Columbia University and MIT and workshops at other institutes.

Over time, Clafter’s research topics and his group have expanded to include geometry constraints and porous motion dynamics, developing models for investigating the surface friction problem, and further expanding the use of anomalous diffusion insights for single protein spectroscopy. The studies on the fluctuation and catalysis of individual enzymes have led to the treatment of basic protein structure questions and their relation to their function structure.

The work on the subjects of Levy’s moves, the limited geometries and the introduction of new equations for the anomalous diffusion field gained momentum and became popular. The mathematical tools developed found their way to different disciplines and thus many groups and in many fields began to use ideas and approaches. Subsequently, a series of conferences, meetings and invitations for writing cover papers were created. The topics of these works have been widely covered by Flannery lectures and review papers on the diffusion and its derivative reactions.

Klafter was accepted as a Fellow of the American Physics Society (1993), won the German Government’s Humboldt Award (1996), in 1999 Clafter received the Weizmann Science Award from the Tel Aviv Municipality, in 2003 the Technion’s Colthof Prize and in 2004 received the Rothschild Award. He was invited as a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Freiburg, Germany (a relationship that ended upon taking up the position of University President). He was later awarded an honorary doctorate from the Wroclaw Technical University, an honorary doctorate from the Slovak Academy of Sciences and an honorary professor at the University of Qinghua in China.

In 2011, his book on first steps in random moves was published in collaboration with Prof. Sokolov. In 2016, the book came out in another edition.

From 1996, Klapter served as a member of the management of the National Science Foundation and responsible for the field of precision sciences and technology at the Foundation, and from 2002 to 2009, Cohen is chairman of the National Science Foundation. During his time, the cooperation agreement was signed between the National Science Foundation and its Chinese counterpart, a collaboration that has expanded and continues today. Philanthropic support for the life sciences and medical sciences has also been established and the framework of a doctor-researcher has been established that enables and encourages research among hospital physicians.

In 2009, Klafter was elected eighth president of Tel Aviv University. He took on the role following the university’s leadership crisis. During the ten years of his presidency, the rifts were merged and the university reached significant heights and achievements. Emphasis was placed, among other things, on advancing research while addressing new resources, expanding international collaborations (with the East), encouraging and supporting the reduction of cross-border barriers and raising the miracle of innovation in learning and entrepreneurship. During his presidency, he chaired the University Committee for two years, a period in which he worked tirelessly to maintain freedom of expression and academic freedom in universities. The presidential term ended in May 2019.

More on the topic at the news site:
Prof. Joseph Clafter, President of Tel Aviv University, elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Tel Aviv University and Qinghua University from China present “Xin” project: $ 300 million joint research center
The strange physical laws of the Nano world