Technion Inaugurates Center for Creative and Engineering Design

The Technion recently inaugurated the Mehoudar Center for Inventors, a center for creative and engineering design. The center will become a home for multidisciplinary collaboration, providing faculty, students, and inventors with the resources and technical assistance to build and test engineering prototypes. 

The center is named in honor of Technion graduate Raphael (Rafi) Mehoudar, a 1966 graduate of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering who received an Honorary Doctorate from his alma mater in 2014. At the age of 20, while still at the Technion, he developed the dual flush toilet mechanism, currently in use in almost every home in Israel. At the same time, he developed a unique sprinkler for watering square areas. Mehoudar went on to invent and develop the drip irrigation technologies that changed the world of agriculture, and today he has about 400 patents registered to his name.

Professor Ezri Tarazi, Head of t-hub – the Technion Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation – noted that “Hundreds of millions of people around the world owe Rafi Mehoudar the very food that is laid out on their table every day. The global climate crisis and the desertification process affecting large parts of the planet only reinforce the vital need for Mehoudar inventions, for the purposes of sustainability and survival.”

Raphael Mehoudar’s legacy lives on in the newly inaugurated center. “The Mehoudar Center for Inventors’ hands-on approach will provide inventors from across the country with access to a productive space to explore and test their ideas and research before taking them to scale,” said Technion President Uri Sivan. “We are confident that this approach will greatly inspire current and future creators to turn their inventions into practical technologies and follow the example set by Rafi and others.”