The Weizmann Women & Science Award is a biennial award established in 1994 to honor an outstanding woman scientist in the United States who has made significant contributions to the scientific community. The objective of the award, which includes a $25,000 research grant to the recipient, is to promote women in science, and to provide a strong role model to motivate and encourage the next generation of young women scientists. [1]
The award was originally given by the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science (ACWIS) and now it is awarded by the Weizmann Institute and the award ceremony takes place at the Weizmann Institute, located in the city of Rehovoth, Israel.
The Weizmann Institute is a center of basic interdisciplinary scientific research and graduate study, addressing crucial problems in technology, medicine and health, energy, agriculture and the environment.
The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is a public research university located in Haifa, Israel. Established in 1912 under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, the Technion is the oldest university in the country. The Technion is ranked as one of the top universities in both Israel and the Middle East, and in the world's top 100 universities in the 2022 Academic Ranking of World Universities.
Robert Maurice Lipson Winston, Baron Winston, is a British professor, medical doctor, scientist, television presenter and Labour peer.
Leland Harrison (Lee) Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division (duplication) of cells.
Shafrira Goldwasser is an Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award in 2012. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley; and co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies.
Aharon Katzir was an Israeli scientist who was known as a pioneer in the study of the electrochemistry of biopolymers.
Jacob Ziv was an Israeli electrical engineer and information theorist who developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms alongside Abraham Lempel.
Ruth Arnon is an Israeli biochemist and codeveloper of the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone. She is currently the Paul Ehrlich Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she is researching anti-cancer and influenza vaccinations.
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is a council, chartered in each administration with a broad mandate to advise the president of the United States on science and technology. The current PCAST was established by Executive Order 13226 on September 30, 2001, by George W. Bush, was re-chartered by Barack Obama's April 21, 2010, Executive Order 13539, by Donald Trump's October 22, 2019, Executive Order 13895, and by Joe Biden's February 1, 2021, Executive Order 14007.
Manchanahalli Rangaswamy Satyanarayana Rao was an Indian scientist. He was awarded the fourth-highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, for Science and Engineering in 2010. From 2003 to 2013 he was president of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bangalore, India.
Thelma Estrin was an American computer scientist and engineer who did pioneering work in the fields of expert systems and biomedical engineering. Estrin was one of the first to apply computer technology to healthcare and medical research. In 1954, Estrin helped to design the Weizmann Automatic Computer, or WEIZAC, the first computer in Israel and the Middle East, a moment marked as an IEEE Milestone in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was professor emerita in the Department of Computer Science, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
Peretz Lavie was the 16th president of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, having taken the position on 1 October 2009 through September 2019. Lavie, an expert in the psychophysiology of sleep and sleep disorders, heads the Technion Sleep Laboratory and holds the André Ballard Chair in Biological Psychiatry. Between 1993 and 1999 he served as dean of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, and between 2001 and 2008, as the Technion’s vice president for resource development and external relations.
The Szent-Györgyi Prize for Progress in Cancer Research, established by National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) and named in honor of Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel laureate and co-founder of NFCR, has been awarded annually since 2006 to outstanding researchers whose scientific achievements have expanded the understanding of cancer and whose vision has moved cancer research in new directions. The Szent-Györgyi Prize honors researchers whose discoveries have made possible new approaches to preventing, diagnosing and/or treating cancer. The Prize recipient is honored at a formal dinner and award ceremony and receives a $25,000 cash prize. In addition, the recipient leads the next "Szent-Györgyi Prize Committee" as honorary chairman.
Florence Pat Haseltine is a U.S. physician, biophysicist, reproductive endocrinologist, journal editor, novelist, inventor, and advocate for women's health. She has been diagnosed with dyslexia. She built a diverse career in medicine. An associate professor at Yale University, her work specializes in obstetrics and gynecology as well as women's rights and gender bias in medicine. While at Yale, Haseltine established the embryology laboratory, which was one of the early labs to have a successful IVF baby. The Microscope used in the laboratory is now in Historical Collections of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
Neta Bahcall is an Israeli astrophysicist and cosmologist specializing in dark matter, the structure of the universe, quasars, and the formation of galaxies. Bahcall is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University.
Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus is a licensed clinical psychologist and professor with the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. Rotheram is the professor-in-residence in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She is the Director of the Global Center for Children and Families at UCLA and the former director of the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services.
Susan M. Gasser is a Swiss molecular biologist. From 2004 to 2019 she was the director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, where she also led a research group from 2004 until 2021. She was in parallel professor of molecular biology at the University of Basel until April 2021. Since January 2021, Susan Gasser is director of the ISREC Foundation, which supports translational cancer research. She is also professor invité at the University of Lausanne in the department of fundamental microbiology. She is an expert in quantitative biology and studies epigenetic inheritance and genome stability. Recipient of multiple swiss and European awards, she was named member of the US Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Sandhya Srikant Visweswariah is a scientist and academic at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. She is currently the Chairperson of the Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development and Genetics and the Co-chair of the Centre for Biosystems Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science. She additionally holds the position of Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Bergen, Norway. Her research involves the investigation of the mechanism of signal transduction via cyclic nucleotides, phosphodiesterases and novel cyclases in bacteria. Most recently, she was awarded a Bill and Melinda Gates Grand Challenges Explorations Grant for her proposal entitled "A Small Animal Model of ETEC-Mediated Diarrhea".
Professor Carol L. Prives FRS is the Da Costa Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She is known for her work in the characterisation of p53, an important tumor suppressor protein frequently mutated in cancer.
Chandrima Shaha is an Indian biologist. As of September 2021, she is the J. C. Bose Chair Distinguished Professor at the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata. She is the former Director and former Professor of Eminence at the National Institute of Immunology. She was the President of Indian National Science Academy (2020–22) and the Vice President of the same academy (2016–2018). She is an elected fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences and the West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology.
Yonina C. Eldar is an Israeli professor of electrical engineering at the Weizmann Institute of Science, known for her pioneering work on sub-Nyquist sampling.