Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham

Head, Mediterranean Sea Research Center of Israel; Founding Director, Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences

Professor Zvi Ben-Avraham, Head of the Mediterranean Sea Research Center of Israel, Founding Director of the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa, Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University, the Department of  Geosciences and Director of Dead Sea Research Center.  
Prof. Ben-Avraham earned his Ph.D. in Marine Geophysics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1973.  He has held professional positions in several research institutes and universities worldwide (Stanford University, University of Cape Town, Free University Amsterdam, University of California Los Angeles), and served in editorial positions for several scientific journals of geosciences (Tectonics, Tectonophysics, Annales Tectonicae and more).  
Prof. Ben-Avraham is a member of several academies of sciences including Academia Europaea, Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He was awarded numerous prizes including the prestigious Israel Prize in Science in 2003 and has served as a Scientific Advisor to the President of the State of Israel.

Dr. Gil Gambash

Head of the Department of Maritime Civilizations, The Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, Haifa Center for Mediterranean History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Haifa 

Gil Gambash is the chair of the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa, and the co-founder and director of the Haifa Centre for Mediterranean History. He has been appointed recently the head of the Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa. He wrote his PhD in Princeton and Oxford, focusing on the relationship between the Roman empire and its provinces. His current research interests center on ancient Mediterranean empires, particularly with regard to aspects of maritime connectivity, mobility, and logistics. Recent publications include: ‘En Route to Egypt – Akko in the Persian Period,’ Journal of Near Eastern Studies 73.2 (2014): 273-282; Rome and Provincial Resistance, New-York: Routledge (2015); ‘Maritime Activity in the Ancient Southern Levant: The Case of Late Antique Dor,’ ARAM 27 (2015): 61-74.

Dr. Zur Shalev

Department of General History, Faculty of Humanities, Haifa Center for Mediterranean History, University of Haifa

Zur Shalev completed his studies at Princeton University (history, 2004). After a post-doctoral stay at Oxford he joined the University of Haifa, where he teaches early modern European history. He specialize in cultural and intellectual history, with particular interest in geographical and religious thought and in Oriental scholarship. Currently he works on geographical Hebraism: an attempt to understand the reception of medieval geographical Hebrew texts in early modern Christian Europe. Another project is focused on the tradition of learned travel to the Levant in the 17th and 18th centuries. At the University of Haifa he convened the Medieval-Renaissance seminar and founded the innovative teaching program Nofei Yeda (Landscapes of Knowledge). Since 2016 he co-edits Mediterranean Historical Review (Routledge). He is co-founder and co-director of the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History. Shalev's published research includes Sacred Words and Worlds (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Ptolemy's Geography in the Renaissance, co-edited with Charles Burnett (London: Warburg Institute, 2011); “Christian Pilgrimage and Ritual Measurement in Jerusalem,” La misura, Micrologus, 19 (2011): 131-150; and “The Travel Notebooks of John Greaves,” in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, ed. A. Hamilton et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 77-102.