Professor Peretz Lavie served as president of the Technion from 2009 to 2019, transforming the university into a global player. In New York City, he was instrumental in creating the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. In China, he helped establish the Guangdong-Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Accelerating the ascent of the Technion to one of the world’s top institutes for science and technology, he recruited world-class faculty; forged international research collaborations; and advanced multidisciplinary learning with the establishment of the Technion Integrated Cancer Center and the Helen Diller Center for Quantum Science, Matter and Engineering.
Joining the Technion in 1975, he founded Israel’s first sleep research laboratory, where he demonstrated the prevalence of breathing disorders during sleep and its link to hypertension and heart disease. He was active in bringing daylight savings time to Israel, and in abolishing school classes in the early morning “zero hour.”
Prior to his presidency, Prof. Lavie was the Technion vice president for resource development and external relations, and dean of the Nobel Prize-winning Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. Currently, he serves as professor emeritus in the Faculty of Medicine and as a consultant to universities in South Korea, France, and Portugal.
His research led to sleep medicine technologies including the Watch-PAT, a hand-mounted device for the diagnosis of sleep apnea. In addition, he was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sleep Research, and his bestselling book “The Enchanted World of Sleep” has been translated into 15 languages.
Prof. Lavie has been the recipient of numerous prestigious prizes throughout his career, including the 1995 Technion Hershel Rich Prize in Technological Innovation, the 2001 Elkeles Prize – Keren Kayemet LeIsrael for Best Medical Scientist, the 2004 University of Pisa Biannual Sleep Research Award, the 2006 William Gruen Prize for Innovative Research from the American Sleep Research Society, the distinguished 2006 EMET Prize in Medicine – Israel, the 2006 Brigham and Women Hospital (Boston) Library award for the book Restless Nights, the 2018 University of Florida Distinguished Alumni Award, the 2020 Commadeur dans l’Orde des Palmes Academiques from the French Government (which is rarely given to scholars outside France), the 2021 Rambam Hospital Award (Yakir Rambam), and the 2022 Kineret College (Jordan Valley) Distinguished Scholar Award.
