The Technion’s story has been intertwined with Israel’s for more than a century, from laying the foundations for a new nation to shaping its future.
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She previously served as executive vice president for innovation and industry relations at the Technion.
Her research focuses on computer vision, AI and machine learning, and haptic feedback — technology that interacts digitally with physical objects by applying force, motion, or vibrations. Today we take for granted that we can hear and see each other remotely on a variety of devices. Through advances in haptic technology, Prof. Zelnik-Manor hopes that eventually we will be able to use touch to pat our dog or tuck our grandchild into bed on a video call. Applications could also extend to medicine where doctors could physically inspect, feel, and palpate their patients remotely.
Prof. Zelnik-Manor received her Technion undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, graduating summa cum laude. She earned her graduate degrees in computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and was a post-doctoral fellow for four years at California Institute of Technology before joining the Technion faculty in 2007.
In addition to her tenure at the Technion, she served as a visiting associate professor during the early years of the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. There, she took an active role in faculty decisions and recruitment, and served as an unofficial consultant for entrepreneurs in the Runway Startup Postdoc Program. From 2018 through 2021, she was a senior director and the general manager of the e-commerce giant Alibaba’s R&D center in Israel.
Prof. Zelnik-Manor has received numerous honors including the Israeli high-education planning and budgeting committee (Vatat) scholarship for outstanding Ph.D. students, the Sloan-Swartz postdoctoral fellowship, the Gutwirth prize for the promotion of research, and several grants. She is also deeply involved in the professional community, where she has chaired programs for the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, one of the most influential conferences in the field, and for the European Conference on Computer Vision.
