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General Directors | Israel Institute for Advanced Studies

General Directors

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Gerald Fink

General Director - previous
Life Sciences
MIT

poster

Bert Sakmann

General Director - previous
Life Sciences
Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg

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Moshe Vardi

General Director - current
Rice University

Moshe Y. Vardi is an Israeli mathematician and a computer scientist. He is the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University.

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His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite-model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is an expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge (logic), and theoretical computer science.

He is the author and co-author of over 600 papers, as well as two books: Reasoning about Knowledge and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. He is currently a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, after having served for a decade as Editor-in-Chief.

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eric maskin

Eric Maskin

General Director - current
Harvard

Eric Stark Maskin is an American economist and 2007 Nobel laureate recognized with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".
 

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He also has made contributions to game theory, contract theory, social choice theory, political economy, and other areas of economics. He is the Adams University Professor at Harvard University. He was a faculty member at MIT from 1977-1984, Harvard from 1985-2000, and the Institute for Advanced Study from 2000-2011. He rejoined the Harvard faculty in 2012.

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Roger Kornberg

General Director - current
Life Sciences
Stanford University

structural biology

Roger D. Kornberg is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA, "the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.”

Anthony Grafton

Anthony Grafton

General Director
Princeton University

Early Modern Europe & History of Science

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Professor Grafton’s current project is a large-scale study of the science of chronology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe: how scholars attempted to assign dates to past events, reconstruct ancient calendars, and reconcile the Bible with competing accounts of the past. He hopes to reconstruct the complex and dramatic process by which the biblical regime of historical time collapsed, concentrating on the first half of the 17th century. Professor Grafton’s special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He joined the Princeton History Department in 1975 after earning his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in history from the University of Chicago and spending a year at University College London, where he studied with Arnaldo Momigliano.

Professor Grafton likes to see the past through the eyes of influential and original writers, and has accordingly written intellectual biographies of a 15th-century Italian humanist, architect, and town planner, Leon Battista Alberti; a 16th-century Italian astrologer and medical man, Girolamo Cardano; and a 16th-century French classicist and historian, Joseph Scaliger. He also studies the long-term history of scholarly practices, such as forgery and the citation of sources, and has worked on many other topics in cultural and intellectual history. Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others. Two collections of essays, Defenders of the Text (1991) and Bring Out Your Dead (2001), cover most of the topics and themes that appeal to him. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical Association. At Princeton he is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History.

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David Gross

David Gross

General Director

Theoretical Physics

David J. Gross is the Chancellor’s Chair professor of theoretical physics and the former director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the Kavli Institute, he was the Thomas Jones professor of mathematical physics at Princeton University.

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Gross was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek, “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.” His other awards include the Sakurai Prize, a MacArthur fellowship, the Dirac Medal, the Oskar Klein Medal, the Harvey Prize, the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the Grande Médaille of the French Academy of Sciences. He holds honorary degrees from institutions in the US, Britain, France Israel, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, China, the Philippines and Cambodia. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2018, he became President-Elect of the American Physical Society.

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