Prof. Eli Waxman

Department of Physics & Astrophysics , Weizmann Institute of Science

Born in Israel, Prof. Eli Waxman earned his PhD degree in physics (1994) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During his graduate studies he also worked at the Physics Department of Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center. During 1994-98 he served as a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). In 1998, he joined the staff of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He served as the head of the particle physics and astrophysics department during 2009-2012, and as senior R&D director at the PM’s office (on leave from the WIS) during 2013-2015. Today he serves as Director of the Benoziyo Center for Astrophysics, as Director of the Schwartz/Reisman Institute for Theoretical Physics and as Chairman of the board of the Pazy Research Foundation.

Prof. Waxman is a theoretical astrophysicist. He made significant contributions to the understanding of explosions of massive stars and the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays- particles which are a hundred million times more energetic than the particles produced in the LHC at CERN. The predictions of his theory of cosmic-ray origin, developed with the late John Bahcall of Princeton, drove the construction of a large, giga-ton, neutrino detector at the South Pole- IceCube.  IceCube has recently begun collecting data, which appear to support the theory. Currently much of his time is devoted to a practical, Israeli- American project that aims to launch a mini-satellite, ULTRASAT, for testing high energy astrophysics theories. ULTRASAT will allow us to detect and study the sources of Gravitational Waves, predicted by Einstein back in 1915 but first observed in 2015, and to study stellar explosions.

Prof. Waxman is married to Vered, a social worker and psychotherapist, and is father to Chen (1990), an art history and archeology student at TAU, and Iddo (1991), who is serving in the IDF.