About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the benefit of humanity.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/science-on-the-brain/
Aug 01, 2006...
The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science (ACWIS) and New York University (NYU) recently held a Day of Science on the topic of “Unveiling the Secrets of the Brain: Collaborations in Neuroscience.”
While the topic of neuroscience could be perceived as daunting, the half-day seminar, which featured four prominent scientists, attracted about 150 people to the Helen & Martin Kimmel Center for University Life at NYU. This large turnout is perhaps because, as Prof. Ilan Chet, President of the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS), Israel, indicated in his welcoming remarks, brain research is one of the areas of science that attracts the most interest from the public. We all want to know who we are, and what makes us “us,” both as a species and as individuals.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/tears-are-a-turnoff/
Apr 04, 2011... When we cry – a universal human behavior – we clearly send all sorts of emotional signals. Now, Institute scientists have shown that some of those emotional signals are chemically encoded in the tears themselves: In research that recently appeared in Science, they demonstrated that merely sniffing a woman's tears – even when the crying woman is nowhere in the vicinity – reduces sexual arousal in men.
Oct 22, 2015... The human brain is “limitless” – and yet, sometimes things go wrong. In this video, Prof. Noam Sobel, Dr. Assaf Tal, Prof. Michal Schwartz, Prof. Alon Chen, Dr. Tali Kimchi, Dr. Ofer Yizhar, Prof. Daniel Zajfman, and Prof. Yadin Dudai talk about studying the brain in health and disease, always learning “what it means to be human, what it means to think, what it means to remember.”
Oct 29, 2014... Prof. Noam Sobel introduces the sensory into the science and dance program: while all our senses are involved in any experience, it is the brain that lets us smell, or hear, or touch. His studies on the brain mechanism behind the sense of smell could lead to early diagnosis of diseases. His dancers are both mechanical and fluid, conveying the way the brain works – and not.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/shining-new-light-on-the-mysteries-of-the-brain/
Jul 20, 2015...
On Thurs. July 16, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science held a conference called “Shining New Light on the Mysteries of the Brain” with Ofer Yizhar, a neurobiology researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
Yizhar completed his undergraduate degree at Tel Aviv University and then his graduate degree in neurobiology at Stanford University, where he completed research until 2011.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/the-president-s-report-2004/
Sep 01, 2005...
Dear Members of the Weizmann Institute Family,
When friends of the Weizmann Institute—and of Israel—ask me for some good news from our region, I have no difficulty in responding. The irrepressible energy and boundless ingenuity of Israeli inventors and entrepreneurs are there for all to see, but to none are they more evident than to those of us immersed in science and research.
Israel is home today to about 500 communications technology companies, 200 in medical instrumentation, 100 in fabless circuit design plus a number of circuit production giants, and 50 in digital printing and imaging. It has become a veritable superpower in data security, with some major companies in the field and about 80 start-ups. There are hundreds of companies developing an impressive range of programming applications—for trading in foreign currency options, for Internet applications, and a great deal more. In my own field of plant science, the long tradition of Israeli innovation is being carried forward by a growing number of biotechnology companies devoted to advanced crop improvement and the production of plant-derived products. In drug design and development, Teva Pharmaceuticals leads as a major player in the world arena and is Israel's largest and most successful commercial company ever. All this, and more, in a country of less than 6 million people!
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/shedding-light-on-the-secrets-of-autism/
Apr 13, 2017... Despite the fact that autism is more prevalent today than ever, its causes are still unknown – though research indicates that there are likely a number of contributing factors: environmental, genetic, neurological, biological. And while Weizmann Institute scientists have made significant contributions to the understanding of autism, developing means of diagnosis, and creating potential treatments, much remains to be done – which is why their research continues at a rapid pace and approaches the condition from multiple angles.
Feb 05, 2019...
Illustration via Shutterstock.com
Comparing human brains to monkey brains reveals that our more evolutionarily advanced brains may be more efficient but are also less robust, according to new research from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.
Neurobiology Prof. Rony Paz explains that our brains are like modern washing machines – technologically sophisticated but more vulnerable to breakdown and costly disorders.
Apr 17, 2019...
For many years, scientists believed that the brain was completely isolated from the immune system because of a shield called the blood-brain barrier.
That dogma has changed, due in no small part to the research of Prof. Michal Schwartz of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Neurobiology.
“My assumption was always that the immune system does help repair the brain, but that it has a very unique way of communicating across the blood-brain barrier,” she says. “This assumption turned out to be correct. However, the work that it took to get there was very difficult.”
Nov 04, 2019... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—November 4, 2019—We might refer to someone’s personality as “mousy,” but in truth, mice have a range of personalities nearly as great as our own. Prof. Alon Chen and members of two groups he heads – one in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Neurobiology and one in the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany – decided to explore personality specifically in mice. This would enable the scientists to develop a set of objective measurements for this highly slippery concept. A quantitative understanding of the traits that make each animal an individual might help answer some of the open questions in science concerning the connections between genes and behavior. The findings of this research were published in Nature Neuroscience.
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