Daniel Chamovitz

Origins and early life

Daniel Chamovitz was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 18 April 1963 and grew up in nearby Aliquippa, where he graduated from Hopewell High School in 1981. In a 2026 essay he recalled his bar mitzvah in 1976 and the unguarded synagogue of his childhood, and wrote that his grandparents had come to America “not as Romanians or Russians but as Jews”; he is also a proud alumnus of the Jewish youth movement Young Judaea.

He began his studies at Columbia University in New York, settled in Israel in 1984 and earned a doctorate in genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, cloning genes involved in the making of beta-carotene.

Work and career

As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University from 1993 to 1996 he discovered the COP9 signalosome, a protein complex that his laboratory at Tel Aviv University then showed to be essential to development in plants and animals alike.

Recognition

His book “What a Plant Knows”, first published in 2012, won a silver medal at the Nautilus Book Awards, appeared in about twenty languages and became an online course followed by more than 100,000 students. At Tel Aviv University he founded the Manna Center Program in Food Safety and Security in 2013 and served as dean of the George Wise Faculty of Life Sciences from 2014 to 2018. On 1 January 2019 he became the seventh president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, and since 1 July 2024 he has also chaired the committee of Israel's university heads.

In March 2022 he received the 2021 Sylvan Adams Nefesh B'Nefesh Bonei Zion Prize for education, given to English-speaking immigrants who have contributed to Israel, and the Jerusalem Post named him in 2023 among its fifty most influential Jews.