Gili Regev-Yochay

Origins and early life

Gili Regev-Yochay was born in Berkeley, California, in 1964, while her father was completing a doctorate in economics, and her family moved to Ramat Aviv in Israel when she was two.

Work and career

After her father's sabbatical year in Berkeley, the family settled in Omer, where he taught economics at Ben-Gurion University, and she became a counselor in the Scouts. A heart defect kept the army from drafting her, so after a year of national service founding a Scouts troop in Tel Mond she volunteered in the Israel Defense Forces, in manpower and then in intelligence. She studied medicine at Ben-Gurion University, trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Sheba Medical Center, and from 2004 spent four years at Harvard researching antibiotic resistance.

In 2017 Sheba asked her to set up its unit for infection prevention and control, and in early 2020 she warned the Ministry of Health of the coming epidemic and helped build the country's first isolation compound for covid-19 patients. Her measurements of how antibodies wane after infection and vaccination, which she says led directly to Israel's decision to offer a third dose, made her research followed far beyond Israel.

She now directs the Sheba Pandemic Preparedness Research Institute, founded with the United States National Institutes of Health, and in 2023 the Jerusalem Post named her among its fifty most influential Jews. No source states her Jewish identity in so many words, and the Jerusalem Post list is not evidence: an Israeli doctor's biography has little reason to say it. She is here under the Israeli presumption the site adopted on 7 September 2026 and extended on 15 October 2026 — a Hebrew given name and surname, a life in Israel and a strong attested tie, here her volunteer service in the Israel Defense Forces — which is a presumption and not a declaration, and which any contrary source overturns.