Prof. Gabriel I. Barbash

Director, Bench to Bedside (BtB) Program Weizmann Institute of Science

Prof. Gabriel Barbash is a graduate of the Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is board certified in Internal Medicine, Medical Management, and Occupational Medicine. He holds a master’s degree in public health (MPH) from Harvard’s School of Public Health. He was Israel’s national coordinator and principal investigator for numerous multi-center cardiology studies (1989-2000). From 1996-1999 he served as the Director General of the Ministry of Health where he introduced several programs that had critical and lasting impact upon the Israeli healthcare system. One program served to control tuberculosis after a surge of new cases occurred with the arrival of a large number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. He orchestrated all four HMOs to cooperate in controlling the re-emergence of this disease. The second was the introduction of nationwide mammography screening for women over 50 years of age which is still ongoing.

Prof. Barbash served as the chairman of the Israeli National Transplant Center (1998-2000), and reorganized the system of organ harvesting in Israel, doubling the number of organ transplantations in Israel. In 2001, Prof. Barbash was appointed Professor of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine in the Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. He was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University (2008-2012) and led a research project with the Agency of Health Quality Research Agency (AHRQ) of the US HHS department on the diffusion of medical technologies with specific focus on the diffusion of robot-assisted surgery in the US.

He served as the CEO of the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (1993-2015). During his tenure at Sourasky, Prof. Barbash was instrumental in enhancing the reputation of the Medical Center by recruiting top names in various fields of medicine, elevating the TASMC to the top of the list of medical centers in Israel. For the 11th year in a row, far more medical interns consider the TASMC as first choice for internship than any other teaching hospital in the country.

In addition to his work as a medical administrator, Prof. Barbash has published more than 80 original papers, mainly in the fields of diagnosis, risk assessment, and treatment of acute myocardial infarction; many of which were published in the prestigious peer reviewed medical journals Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology and the New England Journal of Medicine.