UGAL - Scientific and Cultural Dialogues

Prof. Rubinsky Boris received his BSc and MSc from the Technion in Israel and the Ph.D. from MIT. In 1980 he joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Berkeley and later the UC Berkeley Bioengineering Department, of which he was one of the founders. At UC Berkeley he was the Chancellor’s Professor and the Silverman Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering till 2008 and is now a Professor of the Graduate School. From 2007 to 2009, he took a leave of absence, to found the Department of Bioengineering and the Center for Bioengineering in the Service of Humanity and Society at the Hebrew University that brought together Israeli and Palestinian students. PhD graduates from that program are now Professors at top Israeli and Palestinian Universities. Rubinsky’s research spans numerous areas, from plasma arc welding in space to Weierstrass - Mandelbrot modeling of turbulence. He contributed to various fields of bioengineering, pioneering several leading medical technologies, which he led from pioneering the concept to developing the clinical practice and commercialization. Noteworthy are the technology of imaging monitored cryosurgery which is now the clinical standard of the field, the technology of nonthermal irreversible, which is now clinical and at the forefront of minimally invasive surgery, the technology of non-invasive electromagnetic detection of internal bleeding which is in clinical trials, MEMS technology for single cell analysis which is now ubiquitous and many others.
Boris Rubinsky received the H.R. Lissner Medal for recognizes outstanding achievements in the field of bioengineering.

Ștefan Dascălu is an Immunology Researcher at the University of Oxford and a Healthcare Consultant at Dig Worldwide in the United Kingdom. He completed his doctorate in Interdisciplinary Bioscience (Immunology) at the University of Oxford, where he also studied for his MA in Biological Sciences. Ștefan contributed to national and international COVID-19 pandemic mitigation efforts through various activities including governmental consultancy, public health communication, and advisory responsibilities in vaccination and epidemiology. Alongside these activities and a number of academic publications in immunology and public health, Ștefan received several prestigious awards, including the Social Impact Award (2021) from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and a Knighthood of the Order of Cultural Merit for Scientific Research from the President of Romania (2022). Ștefan is also a strong advocate of faith-based community engagement for public health, and his contributions during the pandemic led to him being awarded the "Order of the Holy Brâncoveanu Martyrs" (2021) from His Beatitude Daniel, Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church.