Eli Barkai is a professor in the Department of Physics at Bar-Ilan University. He received his PhD from Tel Aviv University in 1998 and held positions at MIT and the University of Notre Dame before joining the faculty of Bar-Ilan University in 2004. His areas of research are: dynamics of cold atoms in optical lattices; nano science: blinking quantum dots; statistical physics: foundations of weak ergodicity breaking; biophysics: dynamics of single molecules in live cells; dynamical systems: infinite invariant measures and weak chaos; fractional kinetics; and single molecule photon statistics.

Prof. Barkai has received numerous awards and academic honours, including the Krill Prize for excellence in scientific research (2006) and the Yeshiahu Horowitz Science of Complexity Fellowship (2004).