2021 HONORARY PRESIDENT
H.E. Gianluigi Benedetti
Italian Ambassador in Japan, Former Italian Ambassador in Israel
Committee Members
BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV
Cristina Bettin
President and co-founder
Cristina Bettin Ph.D. is a Social Historian. She is the Organizer and Coordinator of the track’s studies of Civilization Language and Society, Ethics and Moral, Multiculturalism, and Intellectual Creativeness at the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ben Gurion University. Her research interest and publication are divided between Jewish Studies, (in particular Italian Jewish identity and Italian culture and society. The Jewish Palestinian Soldiers and the Jewish Brigade in Italy, where she co-founded in 2018 in Milan, the Museum of the Jewish Brigade. Italy- British Palestine and Israel relations, before, during, and after WWII. Aliya Beth and the Role of Italy in the establishment of the State of Israel)European Studies and, the Role of Humanities for a Sustainable society.
Email: bettin@bgu.ac.il
WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE
Elisabetta Boaretto
Vice-President
Elisabetta Boaretto, Ph.D., is the Director of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science and the Head of the Dangoor Research Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Laboratory for Radiocarbon Dating at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research is focused on solving questions in archaeology using scientific methods. She has co-direct the excavation at Boker Tachtit studying the chronology related to the arrival of modern humans in the Levant. She has developed new methods to study the archaeological record and characterize the materials in relation to past activities. She is particularly interested in understanding the effect of past climate changes on past cultures.
Email: Elisabetta.boaretto@weizmann.ac.il
WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE
Nicoletta Di Bernardo
Representative Ph.D. and Post Doc Student
Nicoletta Di Bernardo is a PhD student of Prof. Efrat Shema's group at the Weizmann Institute working on epigenetics of triple-negative breast cancer.
Email: NICOLETTA@weizmann.ac.il
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HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM
Michael Sierra
Adv. Michael Sierra is a PhD student in law at the Hebrew University, examining regulatory intermediaries, conformity assessment, and regulatory sandboxes as tools for AI governance. He holds an LL.B., LL.M., and B.A. in International Relations, all magna cum laude, from the Hebrew University, and serves as a research associate at the Federmann Cyber Center for Cyber Security, the James J. Shasha Center for Strategic Studies, and the Cheshin Center for Advanced Legal Studies. He is a former board member of the Israel Law Review and Hukim Law Review and a current member of i-Lex: Journal of Law, Cognitive Science and AI, and has worked as a research and teaching assistant. He also worked at the Jerusalem District Court, at the Israeli Supreme Court, at the Israel Democracy Institute, studying AI’s impact on vulnerable societies and co-authoring an upcoming book with Dr. Tehila Altshuler. In public service, he served in the IDF, leading diplomatic and humanitarian initiatives, and he is a board member of the Italian Community in Israel.
BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV
Aaron Fait
Treasurer and co-founder
Aaron Fait, PhD., Max and Rochelle Etingin Chair in Desert Research French Associates Institute for Agriculture and Biotechnology of Drylands.
The Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is specialized in the field of metabolomics and metabolic natural variance. In the past 13 years at Ben Gurion University, at the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, he set up the laboratory for metabolomics to investigate seed and fruit metabolism and metabolic stress response in crops. Since 2009 his lab has been heavily involved in several projects on desert viticulture and grape quality in a changing climate.
Email: fait@bgu.ac.il
BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV
Nadav Davidovich
Board Member
Nadav Davidovich, MD, MPH, Ph.D. is an epidemiologist and public health physician in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Guilford-Glaser Faculty of Business and Management at Ben-Gurion University and currently serves as Director of the university’s School of Public Health. His current research deals with health policy; health inequities; health and immigration; vaccination policy; environmental health, global health, and public health history and ethics. Prof. Davidovitch serves on several international and national committees, among them: Governing Board, European Public Health Association; Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER) COVID-19 Task Force; Israel advisory committee for COVID-19.
Email: nadavd@bgu.ac.il
UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA
Andrea Ghermandi
Board Member
Ph.D., Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Haifa. He is an editor for the journals Ecosystem Services and PeerJ – The Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences and an alumnus of the Global Young Academy. An environmental engineer by training, his research spans a range of fields including the valuation and mapping of ecosystem services, the use of research synthesis techniques and crowdsourced digital data in environmental studies, and the technical and economic analysis of ecological engineering and nature-based solutions. His research on the use of social media in environmental research was awarded the 2021 Stage-BGU Award for Excellence in Environmental Sciences.
Email: aghermand@univ.haifa.ac.il
TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY
Marcelo Sternberg
Board Member
Marcelo Sternberg, Ph.D., School of Plant Sciences & Food Security, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University. He is an experimental ecologist interested in the effects of human activities on natural and agricultural ecosystems. Within this topic, he addresses questions covering global climate change, plant ecology, ecosystem functioning, and agroecology. In particular, he is interested in the development of ecological research using experimental approaches to tackle the challenges of global climate change. Prof. Sternberg was recently nominated as Chang Jiang Chair Professor at Ningxia University in China. This is the highest academic award given by the Chinese government to scientists.
Email: marcelos@tauex.tau.ac.il
BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY
Emanuele Dalla Torre
Board member and Webmaster
Emanuele Dalla Torre, born in Milan and proudly holding both Italian and Israeli heritage, is a distinguished Physicist and Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan University whose pioneering research spans non-equilibrium many-body quantum physics, topological quantum phases, ultracold atomic systems, superconducting circuits, and quantum optics. His theoretical innovations—ranging from uncovering novel universal behaviors in interacting quantum systems to simulating topological states on emerging quantum hardware—have shaped the frontier of quantum technologies. Beyond academia, he serves as Chief Scientist at QuantyMize, a dynamic startup developing accelerated algorithms for quantum computers to tackle real‑world optimization challenges across energy, e‑commerce, and scheduling industries.
Email: emanuele.dalla-torre@biu.ac.il
HONORARY MEMBER
Gaia Molco
Co-president of the Israel - Italy Chamber of Commerce and Industry
Gaia Molco, Co-Founder of X-Applied, an Italian consulting firm operating in both the public and private sectors. X-Applied is primarily active in the fields of artificial intelligence (with a particular
focus on generative AI), healthcare, and cloud technologies.
HONORARY MEMBER
Roni Benatoff
President of the Israel - Italy Chamber of Commerce and Industry
HONORARY MEMBER
Nora Alkabes
Director of the Italian Technion Society
