Dr. Merav Parter earned her BSc in bioinformatics summa cum laude from Bar-Ilan University in 2005. She earned her MSc in bioinformatics (2008) and her PhD in computer science (2014) from the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the guidance of Prof. Uri Alon and Prof. David Peleg, respectively, focusing on the topology of wireless communication. Following a brief postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Peleg, she chose to broaden her horizons with a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked with Prof. Nancy Lynch on fault-tolerance, distributed network algorithms, and bio-inspired distributed algorithms. She joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in June 2017.
Distributed networks are everywhere, across a range of computational settings: computers in a network, servers in a data center, ants in a colony, humans in a social network, and even neurons in the brain. As a scholar of theoretical computer science, Dr. Parter focuses her research on the theory of distributed computing (TDC) and algorithms for distributed networks. She is pursuing both theoretical and applied aspects of TDC in four areas: wireless computational geometry and applications; structures, models, and algorithms for fault tolerance; distributed computation for massive networks and datasets; and, bio-inspired distributed algorithms—that is, learning how to solve distributed problems faster and understand the computational power of the biological systems (e.g., ant behavior in a colony and the activity of neural circuits in the brain). Her goal is to deepen the connections between distributed computing and other subareas both within and beyond theory—applying the power of TDC to economics, sociology, neuroscience, and animal science.
Dr. Parter has received numerous awards both for her research and communication skills, including the Israel National Postdoctoral Award for Advancing Women in Science (2015); the Chorafas Prize (2015); a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship (2015); and the Rothschild postdoctoral fellowship (2015), among many other prizes for academic excellence.