Professor Asher Cohen is the fourteenth president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a position he has held since September 1, 2017. Prior to serving as president, Professor Cohen was the Hebrew University’s rector, a position he held for five years. In that capacity, he led important initiatives, among them recruiting top researchers from Israel and abroad, opening new and innovative academic programs, refreshing the University’s curricula, and developing in-depth processes for continual improvement of students’ education, in cooperation with the Students’ Union. After graduating from the Hebrew University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in psychology, Professor Cohen completed his doctoral and post-doctoral studies at the University of Oregon. He served as a senior lecturer at Indiana University before returning in the early 1990s to the Hebrew University’s Department of Psychology, which he headed from 2008 to 2012. Professor Cohen’s research in the cognitive sciences focuses on the relationship between the human perception system and human response mechanisms in situations that require very fast motor responses. In the framework of his research, he developed a theoretical model that successfully predicts the situations in which performing two tasks simultaneously will lead to a decline in abilities.
Professor Elisheva Baumgarten is the academic head of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the head of the Mandel Scholion Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also the Yitzchak Becker Professor of Jewish Studies in the department of Jewish history and contemporary Jewry and in the history department of the University. Professor Baumgarten studies the social and religious history of the Jews of medieval northern Europe (1000–1400). Her research focuses on the social history of the Jewish communities living in the urban centers of medieval Europe and especially on daily contacts between Jews and Christians. It seeks to include those who did not write the sources that have reached us, with a special interest in women and gender hierarchies. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor Baumgarten has served as the advisor for bachelor’s students in the department of Jewish History, co-organizer of the new faculty forum, chair of the Limud beChevruta project, and vice dean of research in the humanities faculty. She was also a member of the executive committee of the Israel’s Young Academy and was recently chosen as a member of the 2020–2021 Edmond de Rothschild Foundation’s Academic Leaders Program. Professor Baumgarten has received awards and fellowships from the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, EHESS, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Yad Hanadiv Rothschild Foundation, and her publications have received several prizes. She is the recipient of the 2016 Michael Bruno Memorial Award for outstanding Israeli researchers and has received research grants from the Israel Science Foundation, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the German-Israel Foundation and the European Research Council. She holds a bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude), a master’s degree (summa cum laude) and a doctorate (summa cum laude) in Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Women’s Studies Program and Departments of History and Religion of the University of Pennsylvania.
