Integrated Calendar

Time-urgent policy decisions are increasingly benefiting from the scientific assessments of risks and outcomes. However the ability to inject science into decision processes can be haphazard, requiring awareness of potential tools and involvement in the policy decisions. I hope to provide some insight on how science is drawn into decisions through a series of examples including the Fukushima Daiichi accident and aircraft safety to the Gulf oil spill and Ebola.

Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is the most frequent life threatening genetic disorder in the western world. The disease is caused by mutations in the CFTR genes that encode a chloride membrane channel protein that is expressed in epithelial cells. Malfunction of this protein causes a multi system disorder: lungs, pancreas, intestine, liver, bones, sweat glands and male reproductive system. Two years ago the FDA approved Kalydeco, the first personalized drug which is mutation specific: for CF patients that have at least one copy of the mutation G551D. Binding of Kalydeco to the impaired CFTR protein restores its functionality.
The following will be reviewed: CF-genetic basis, prognosis, treatments and genetic tests in Israel and Kalydeco - mode of action, clinical effect on patients, future development and its Israeli angle.

Flash floods caused by convective rain storms are highly sensitive to space-time characteristics of rain cells. In several recent studies we exploited the high space–time resolution of the radar data to study the characteristics of rain cells in the arid, semi-arid and Mediterranean parts of Israel. A unique approach was applied to examine the impact of convective rain cell characteristics on flash flood magnitude. A rain cell model was applied to the radar data of an actual storm and the rain fields represented by the model were further served as input into a hydrological model. Global sensitivity analysis was applied to identify the most important factors affecting flash flood peak discharge. As a case study we tested an extreme storm event over a semi-arid catchment in southern Israel. We found that relatively small changes in the rain cell’s location, speed and direction could cause a three-fold increase in flash flood peak discharge at the catchment outlet. Based on analysis of space-time rainfall patterns and synoptic conditions in the Mediterranean climate regions of Israel, a stochastic high-resolution rainfall model (“weather generator”) was developed and used to study the potential impact of predicted climate change on streamflow in the Ramot Menashe region.

Recently, there has been considerable interest in the study of spontaneous synchronization, particularly within the framework of the Kuramoto model. The model comprises oscillators with distributed natural frequencies interacting through a mean-field coupling, and serves as a paradigm to study synchronization. In this talk, I will describe the model from a different point of view, emphasizing the equilibrium and nonequilibrium aspects of its dynamics from a statistical physics perspective.I will discuss in a unified way known results with more recent developments obtained for a generalized Kuramoto model that includes inertial effects and noise.