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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As a child growing up in Israel, Eliad Peretz was fascinated by space and the night sky. His goal, which he laid out in a five-year plan that he wrote as a fifth-grader, was to work for the organization whose mission was to address the big questions he wanted to pursue: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “I’m living my dream,” Peretz, who currently works at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told JNS in a phone interview.
On May 1, 2023, the American Technion Society will celebrate Peretz, a graduate of the Technion’s aerospace engineering faculty and a recipient of NASA’s exceptional achievement medal in a ceremony at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Speakers at the event, which is pegged both to Israel’s 75th anniversary and to the Technion’s upcoming centennial next year, include Peretz Lavie, a former Technion president and chairman of the Israeli Friends of Technion; as well as Technion and NASA colleagues, including John Mather, a senior NASA astrophysicist and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics.
Ahead of the event, Peretz told JNS about his current NASA job, where he works in the division of heliophysics, the science of the sun.